Entrée – one of Bergen’s leading non-profit, independent spaces – has this year made a decisive commitment to showing single-screen film and video works in the most optimal conditions possible. “After eight years as a white cube, which can create really harsh conditions for video and film, I thought it was time to adjust the space and devote a full year to these media”, says Entrée’s co-founder and curator, Randi Grov Berger. “Together with my artist colleague Andrew Amorim, I started planning how to rebuild Entrée to present moving-image works in more ideal conditions.” By Helena Haimes

From mid-March, the gallery is devoting its entire programme to artists’ moving-image works, converting its exhibition space, located in the very centre of Bergen, into a small but impeccably equipped movie theatre. The programme promises to be rich, varied and globally relevant, and includes a mixture of commissioned and existing works by international and Norwegian artist filmmakers. It kicks off with three works by emerging Berlin-based Chinese artist Yafei Qi that investigate the growing feminist movement in her native country. Later highlights include a collaborative project with curator Ingrid Haug Erstad that presents Anton Vidolke’s widely-praised Immortality For All, a film trilogy exploring the lineage and legacy of Russian Cosmism; an Entrée-commissioned work by Marysia Lewandowska that continues her research-led exploration of archives, collections and exhibitions; as well as screenings of works by Goutam Ghosh and Jason Havneraas, Johanna Billing and Jon Raffman, among others.

Screening at Entrée between 29 March and 8 April is British artist Ian Giles’s film After BUTT. Grov Berger first met Giles during her curatorial residency at New York’s ISCP in 2014, and she and Amorim reconnected with him when they were back there last year. “When he started telling us about his work in progress it aroused our curiosity”, she tells me. “When he later sent us the finished work we were stunned: there are so many layers of information, and so many things going on at the same time in his work, which makes it complex and simple at the same time.”

Giles’s film is a meditation on the impact and legacy of BUTT Magazine – the iconic, pink-paged magazine made by and for gay men between 2001 and 2011. The film’s fulcrum is a series of interviews that the artist conducted with the publication’s founders – Jop Van Bennekom and Gert Jonkers – as well as other contributors, including arts and culture journalist Alex Needham and curator Stuart Comer. Giles compiled and edited this material into a script with a narrative structure that loosely tells BUTT’s story in chronological order, which was then performed by a selected group of younger gay men in a filmed series of workshops.

The resulting work is both a cross-generational celebration and incisive critique of the magazine and its authentic representations of gay culture at a crucial point in its history. The late 90s and early 2000s saw the introduction of combination therapy for HIV, and with it a renewed wave of sexual freedom and a new sense of the multiplicity of gay identity rather than the preened and polished “muscle marys” who had previously been so dominant in gay publishing. It showed that, as one of the interviewees puts it, “there are many ways to be gay”.

Giles first came across BUTT when he was a student at Chelsea College of Art, London, in 2005. “I initially liked it as an object”, he tells me. “The black images, the pink paper, this zine quality. Every other magazine on the shelf was shiny and just looked like Vogue, whereas this stood out.” Ten years later, he was reintroduced to the magazine when staying with a friend in Amsterdam who was working for Van Bennekom and Jonkers, and had a collection of BUTT issues in her spare room. Freshly intrigued, he started flicking through them while filming on his phone – a gesture that he repeatedly recreates in the final film as a nod to the publication’s design.

After BUTT gently reflects the magazine’s aesthetics and seductive objectness, though Giles was careful to keep these references subtle. “I think what I have continued to do is employ BUTT’s sense of a natural but published conversation – my film expands approaches to publishing by representing the interviews I carried out and translating them into the medium of film.”

Older viewers are likely to feel a twinge of shock at the ease with which the film subjects such a relatively recent era to creative historicisation. Again, this was an artistic decision that was grounded in the magazine itself, and its distinctive approach to gay history and culture. “They interviewed a lot of people who’d been hugely influential on gay culture in the forty-year period before the magazine was founded”, Giles explains. “They didn’t want to teach people about gay histories, but record their histories – they’d interview John Waters or Don Bachardy, who was an amazing painter, and Christopher Isherwood’s partner. They identified this catalogue of men who’d been through a lot themselves, so it was easy to historicise it because of that. Plus, the design of BUTT looks old in a way, which strangely means it sort of hasn't dated either.”

Another thread running through the film is a constantly shifting and intentionally nebulous sense of authorship. The artist-author, for example (handing out scripts, instructing the session’s participants) is himself played by a young actor. This is reinforced in the film’s script – available at Entrée as part of an accompanying publication – which refers to interviewees as numbers rather than names. “I wanted to make it more of a collective voice, and initially it was to protect the honest way that people had spoken in our interviews”, said Giles.

Though obviously seen as crucial to the creative process of most conventional films, the use of a pre-written script as a structural device reflects a new direction for Giles. He explains that he’s moved closer to a more traditional, planned approach in his recent work, having previously made many of his creative decisions in the editing room. “Some of my previous projects definitely influenced that process”, he recalls. “Essential Rhythms, a film loosely based on the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, was the first time I worked with other people’s words – I did a workshop with people, recorded their words and re-narrated them as a voiceover.”

His influences also extend into theatrical territory. A Caryl Churchill play, Pigs and Dogs, exploring events leading to Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act in 2014, which was at London’s Royal Court in 2016, proved especially inspiring. “The play spliced quotes from lots of different people, it’s performed by three actors who walk around in a triangle and recite quotes in single sentences, and the audience has to piece them together.”

The set of contemporary visual and performance practices that theorists have come to call ‘participatory art’ provided the artist with another fruitful source of inspiration, though their impact is purposefully oblique and intelligently referenced. This participatory element is reinforced by the lasting friendships forged during After BUTT’s production, which the artist sees as crucial to the final film’s intimate atmosphere. “I’m constantly alluding to and borrowing from the aesthetics of participation”, he says, “and the script and the making of the film were great ways of getting this group of people together”.

Ian Giles, After BUTT, Entrée, Bergen, Norway, 29 March - 8 April 2018. The program is curated by Randi Grov Berger & Andrew Amorim. One project with Anton Vidokle this fall is curated by Ingrid Haug Erstad.

The phrase points only to that supposedly final destination we all drift towards. “I go” signals no point of departure other than the I, or the eye in this case, the mechanic eye of the camera that receives waves of light reflected of oceans and train platforms, of men, women and children, or traces of men, women and children. I clearly remember a stage set among ruins and what appears to be an actor on that stage. There is a frantic camera roaming through a church and a warehouse, both seemingly abandoned, the moving images issuing from two monitors set above a video of the arctic seas, then train platforms yet again and fleeting images of woods and passers-by. Along the furthest wall of the gallery, double exposures from Disneyland have my eyes scrambling to make sense of this once coveted land, whilst at the other end of the room, Chris Marker’s film marks a spot on the proverbial flip-side of Disneyland’s bright and cheery coin, a Junkopia as the work is titled where amongst other things my eye clings to images of a small ship made from refuse that sails out to sea in grey, choppy waters, towards the horizon of what I later surmise is the Pacific Ocean, that unfathomably vast expanse of sea separating the west from the east and one date from the next. In a video by Andrew Amorim next to this, boys, I assume they are boys at any rate, on motorbikes strut their stuff on the highway or the byway accompanied by some lament, a cascade of vowels pointing strangely to the e and the o. The boys’ mastery and showmanship on these motorized bicycles is as fleeting to passengers in adjacent cars as the Tibetan Buddhist mandalas on some beach inevitably to be swept away with the tide and the sands. Waves swell and ebb in the works of two separate artists both named Janne, whilst the click clack clack of five slide projectors spinning around their own axis leads me back to the trains and the platforms, to train stations, the passing of each one marks a new spot on the map which is laid out on a table behind me next to a book titled fünfundvierzig. The German sounding names on the signs puts me in mind of all the movie-scenes I’ve seen of individuals and whole families being dragged away in the dead of night only to be crammed together a scene later like animals into small compartments not fit for cattle, the sounds of yelling and gates slammed shut, the screech of rusty iron gates welcoming the emaciated to their collective hell in so-called workers camps somewhere in Poland for example during the last three years of the second world war, and as I stand there taking in these scenes that Damian Heinisch captured and exposed from the train, I realise that having started off with the simple I go (to and from nowhere), I have ended up somewhere. This inevitable wanting to go somewhere, fromsome thing, has me feeling like I’ve betrayed a central tenet of the exhibition whilst at the same time, it puts me in mind of a photograph Robert Frank made in Mabou in 1989 that I recently came back to. In what at first glance struck me as being blood on the surface of a black and white negative, Frank wrote hold still / keep going.

There is no press release accompanying this exhibition, no list indicating titles. In fact, other than the information which the works themselves offer, all I have to go on is a quick note by the gallerist saying that all the works were made by the artists in countries that were not native to them. In a certain way, this is refreshing, and entirely in keeping with what I sense is the premise for the exhibition. We surround ourselves with what we think are explanations, with words, words, words and more words accompanying pictures all too often and rely on them in order to make of photographs fathomable, handy morsels to be consumed and disposed of safely. And yet, one could ask whether this lack, of words or attempted explanation, isn’t instead due to negligence, or a simple lack of proper preparation?

On the face of it, eõ seems a fancy way of saying what Instagram-posts, credit card advertisements and popular philosophy has told us for as long as I can remember: focus on the journey, not the destination. I say this with a certain reservation, with a on the face of it, because what these catchphrases lack (and which I expect to find in eõ) is a critical distance as to the meaning or veracity of what has in effect become a self-evident turn of phrase. The idea that the journey matters more than the destination speaks of course to the current interest in mindfulness, accepting your inner silence or any other number of trending explorations into Being. I too, because of my constant vacillations, because of the incessant din inside my head, often wish to be like the proverbial drop of water returning to the sea. I too at times covet just being there, like Chance the gardener. And yet I can’t help escape (for lack of a better word) the feeling that all this focus on being here and there and in the moment, mindful and present, is also a kind of fast-track to forgetfulness, escape and disengaging from the world.

I come back to Robert Frank’s four words. What would it mean to hold still and keep going in our part of the world where it appears that denial has become the survival skill above all others, enabling us to turn a blind eye as populism has run rampant and mass migration, economic crisis and environmental disasters are about to tip an iceberg socially, financially, and ethically?

The phrase I GO could be said to mirror the human condition. We go, we move, we travel, migrate and accumulate if not wisdom, then at least experience, on the way, which is hopefully passed on. Movement figures prominently in this exhibition, but it is of a seemingly aimless kind. Movement spinning around its own axis, as orientation plain and simple, rather than the pathological, incessant movement where something is left behind in order to seek out somewhere, or something else; the answer, the right place, space, greener pasture or what have you.

As I go, eõ, I accumulate and assimilate. I absorb and reflect, I act and react and things and other people in turn act and react to me and things and other people again, and in this to and fro, acting and reacting as I go, connections are forged. Relationships between people and things are sealed as if by the blinding blaze of the welder, grafted on to our skin and memories, relationships which in turn develop into a continuum of collective memory, a body of knowledge we call it, of events that must not be forgotten that we in turn can pass on to those who were not there to witness it first hand. As I stand at Noplace in front of a small series of photographs by Behzad Farazollahi depicting among other things actors on a stage, apparently ruined as an effect of what I assume is either civil war or some coalition based military operation espousing freedom, I think of a telephone conversation I had years earlier with a good friend I seldom speak to, who explained to me the concept of object permanence. What makes peekaboo so endlessly fascinating for children at an early stage of development is that they are unable to understand that things, when not immediately within view, still exist. The face, that just moments ago literally dis-appeared and was replaced by a set of hands, appears just as suddenly again as if from nowhere. Out of sight, out of mind. I turn around and think of memory and its inevitable inversion, oblivion, as train stations and their names in Damian Heinisch’s works are projected on the wall and disappear just as quickly. I turn to the left and see Janne Kruse’s works on paper where photographs of the sea are set either above or below an equally prominent line, the gesture as an inscription has me aware that the world, for adults as well as toddlers, inscribes itself in mysterious ways into our being whether we will it or not. Even though we can not literally nor figuratively “re-member” a given scene, it leaves an indelible impression on us in much the same way as light etches its way into the light-sensitive material of the film or the sensor, leaving a latent impression.

I am not a particularly good traveller. I am timid and uneasy about asking for directions for example, and because of this, engaging with a new city or a given space, is not so much about finding the quickest route from A to B, but to begin the process of creating an embodied map of the space. Travelling or moving around, for humans as well as rats, is a way of stimulating neural circuits and establishing internalised maps of experience, maps emerging from a mix of smells issuing from lavish restaurants or public restrooms for example, of the hazy light experienced as the sun rises and gleams off the pavement still wet from last nights rain, of the unintelligible sounds and signs of foreign languages, and of photographs captured and processed days, weeks or even years later. Walking around a city or a church, travelling across the ocean, visiting a site of former or current atrocities or tracing the outlines of a small cell is not simply a means of orienting oneself, it is like the act of photographing, a means of constituting one’s surroundings. Photography is not simply the act of re-presenting the world as it appears, it is in effect to create and cement those appearances. Similarly, to travel is to make a space once only envisaged, real. It is rightly claimed that we live both in and through images to an extent hitherto unimaginable, and I think of John Berger who questioned what the all-pervasiveness of photography would do to our memory, and subsequently our imagination?

I just returned from Athens, a city I had only visited in pictures until now. I was awestruck by the early morning light as it hit the massive fragments of the Parthenon from the east, rendering the marble columns as glowing ivory towers against the hazy blue sky beyond, the thing surprisingly living up to my expectations about it, while at the same time leaving me fulfilled, complete. Having seen it, it was out of my mind. I was similarly struck by the lack of refugees in the streets, not only around the Acropolis, which was to be expected, but also around the ferry terminals and various train-stations. I walked and walked and was relegated to the realm of my imagination much as I had been before my arrival, trying to envision what those once fleeing bodies were experiencing in their newfound confinement, on the outskirts of Athens where I knew they were stowed together by the thousands. And because they were out of sight, they were most definitely not out of mind.

Athens, like eõ, is fragmented. A city of collective and unique memories, of ideas and utopias and, like Sverre Strandberg’s Disneyland, a mix of things both real and imagined. The fragmented or ruinous, that presents itself to us as unfinished or incomplete opens up for visions of an imagined whole. Fragments, and in extension absence, make us more than beholden, adoring beholders in front of an image of perfection, they make us participants. The works in this exhibition and the relations between them intimate and insinuate. They leave us to fill in the blanks, and because we are forced to give something of ourselves in order to receive, there is a possibility that the encounter will be an intimate one.

When Damian Heinisch goes by train, from Oslo to the Ukraine to visit the site where his father’s father is buried in an unnamed grave, he is passing through certain narratives or images if you will, that have, through the course of his upbringing, played an important role in determining how he sees himself. Making a train journey and figuratively retracing the steps of a man incarcerated by the Russians at the end of World War II, a train journey that also takes him via a certain route he himself travelled as a refugee with his parents in the late seventies when they escaped the Iron Curtain, he validates something. Though we, subsequent generations, can never know the horrors of those who suffered at the hands of prison guards in internment camps, be they in Germany, Russia or Cambodia to name just a few, though we up here in Scandinavia can not fathom what it must be like to be interned in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Athens in 2018, out of sight, we should keep in mind what it means to visit these places. Going through the motions of standing in the place where someone once stood, travel as they did and look upon the same stretch of land or sea, is a way of breaking out of the image and enabling a literally touching experience that film and photography often falls short of making manifest, and to this end, there is a certain kind of performativity to the works in eõ. To be present where someone once was, is not only to bear witness to their existence, their joys or sufferings, it is to inscribe part of that history into ones self, a history one in turn becomes the bearer of.

I consider this as I move to and fro in the space and notice that the works do not touch me in the sense I had foreseen. Instead of being sucked into the emotional landscape of each artist’s works and thoughts of whatever it is they are working with, I instead find myself becoming a traveller intersecting as it were with fellow travellers. The stories related to me become anecdotal and their importance resides not so much in what they divulge, as in the fact that they point to the importance of something as basic and often overlooked in our media-saturated age, of how vital it is to see things for one’s self. Whether it be taking school classes to visit former concentration camps with the white buses in Poland, standing on the shores of the Mediterranean, visiting the Chartres Cathedral or any number of exhibition-spaces or live-music venues, the importance of the first-hand experience, however fraught with problems that notion is, should not be underestimated. I go, I go, I go.

I force the E out in an elongated breath of air and feel it followed immediately by the deeper sounding o, reverberating at the back of my throat before I inhale again and the sequence can start anew. An image of a young girl in Athens breaks the sequence, the girl, no more than thirteen years old, fourteen tops, was shaking an infant girl to and fro, violently pressing the tiny face to her breast, a breast betraying its complete lack of nutrition to all the Saturday afternoon shoppers whisking past. E o, E o, the rhythm makes of it a religious incantation that could go on in perpetuum, like the steady stream of passers-by taking little if any notice at all, of this child’s struggle. E o, E o, I go and think of the images of this mother-daughter dyad, how they haunted me at first as they were so replete with injustice, with help and hopelessness. I go on my way and feel these visions of them fading from view. I return to the safety of my hotel room, the airport, the sight of my own family and recognise how the image of her desperation which at first held such sway over me will wither away like a muscle unless one remember to exercise. For better or worse, I could simply E o, E o until the characteristic, violent heaving rattle of death signals that the final lift and fall of this phrase has left the body along with its meaning, and I could go from this world for good.

The Art of Seeing. David Goldblatt in his own words about his retrospective at Centre Pompidou. By Nina Strand

The photographer David Goldblatt was present for a press preview the day before his grand opening at Centre Pompidou this Spring. His voice is also very present throughout the exhibition, since in each room several films are presented, in which he explains the story behind his images. Goldblatt is a key figure on the South African photography scene and for the first time in France, the Centre Pompidou has mounted a retrospective of his work. The exhibition includes a selection of his major series, and reveals lesser-known groups of pictures, like his first photos taken in the townships of Johannesburg. As Centre Pompidou writes, all his series cast a sharp eye on the complexity of social relations under apartheid and ask big questions about our time.

Of the current situation in South Africa today, he comments: “The country is recovering from a terrible period of corruption, bad government and disrespect for our constitution. It’s difficult to say what will happen. There is great promise in the new president, and I’m hopeful for the future, although it will take us a long time to recover.” His work, he explains, can only can touch on these issues. “I can’t deal with the grand questions.” Asked if he is looking for complexity in his work, he answers that everything is complex. “This is what reality is like; it’s never simple, there’s always complexity, and I try to take account of it in the work I do.”

On the question of how he works, Goldblatt explained that he is not at all interested in style and doesn’t even think he has a style. He works on what intrigues him. “If I’m mystified by what I’m seeing, then I want to photograph it. Photography to me is a magical tool to show the world. Whether I convey the mysteries in my photograph, I don’t know. I follow my ideas. I get to work, see what happens, and then turn the pictures into series. The series may take several weeks, or several years. I followed one series for 15 years.”

Speaking of photography in general, he is optimistic. “I think things have changed: we’re all fully informed today – we know the world and we’ve seen the photographs. The ability of photography today is to make relevant statements, and the cleverer and more creative photographers, two of whom are here today” – he points to the artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin who are present for the opening, also exhibiting at Pompidou in the Galerie Photographies – “are doing new things, finding new means of expression and ways in which photography relates to the world that we haven’t expected, that we haven’t seen.” Adam Broomberg later tells me how happy he and Chanarin are to be exhibiting together with Goldblatt: “We’re all eastern European Jews, and from South Africa, so you could say both the Holocaust and the apartheid regime runs in our veins.” Goldblatt spent many hours seeing their show: “There are the same amount of images in our exhibition as in David’s, and he took time to look though them all.”

Asked if he looks at his work as art, Goldbatt’s answer is clear: “I grew up in photography. I was privileged. But I have to be frank, I don’t look at myself as an artist. If you tell me that my work is art I don’t mind, but I have no ambitions in art. Art and photography is a very risky relationship. I think that photographers need to be cautious about being convinced that they’re artists. A friend of mine made the distinction ‘the art of work or the work of art’, and I’m leaning heavily towards the first.”

As to the question of the role of photography today, when everyone can take pictures with their mobile phones, Goldblatt replies: “The development of digital technology is a huge advantage, and should be looked at in relation to writing. We can all write, we all have pens, but that doesn’t mean that we’re all writers. Having a pen doesn’t make us all poets. If you’re looking at photography as a medium for penetrating thought, then there are different skills. France has been blessed with some extraordinary photographers from the very beginning of photography. These are people who had the seeing eye. You can’t learn to have the seeing eye at school – you must just have it.”

By making subjectivity a theme of their work, these artists explore the tensions between conceptions of self and society. Essay by Brian Sholis.

In recent decades, those of us attuned to art have witnessed a transformation in the narratives about its history. Scholars have begun integrating into the story of art the achievements of those who, because of gender or skin color or geography or chosen medium, were previously unconsidered or deliberately neglected. At the same time, the modernist notion of art’s developmental progression through avant-garde styles has been set aside; now we recognise, even if imperfectly, the multiplicity of every era. These have been welcome developments.

The American historian Daniel T. Rodgers analyzed related intellectual developments through the lens of American culture in his 2011 book Age of Fracture. During the second half of the twentieth century, he noted that:

conceptions of human nature that in the post–World War II era had been thick with context, social circumstance, institutions, and history gave way to conceptions of human nature that stressed choice, agency, performance, and desire. Strong metaphors of society were supplanted by weaker ones. Imagined collectivities shrank; notions of structure and power thinned out. Viewed by its acts of mind, the last quarter of the century was an era of disaggregation.

The disaggregation that Rodgers describes has had a political fallout. The Indian essayist Pankaj Mishra, writing recently in The Guardian, called ours “The Age of Anger.” He suggested that what was missing from earlier, more coherent narratives of society was:

the fear ... of losing honour, dignity and status, the distrust of change, the appeal of stability and familiarity. There was no place in [those stories] for more complex drives: vanity, fear of appearing vulnerable, the need to save face. Obsessed with material progress, the hyper-rationalists ignored the lure of resentment for the left-behind and the tenacious pleasures of victimhood.

The economic and political dislocations that revealed these “complex drives,” and our relative inability to perceive and think through them, were on the minds of Objektiv’s editorial board when we decided to produce two issues about the relationship between art, politics, and subjectivity. The efficacy of art in the political arena is perpetually under question. Yet one position to which art’s adherents cling is the value of artists’ insights into present social and political conditions. The five of us, to greater or lesser degrees, share that faith; that is partly why we work as artists, curators, editors, and writers. We asked ourselves: what might artists tell us about the conditions in which we find ourselves? The breakdown of master narratives in art and in politics has reminded those in power that the world contains irrepressible multitudes. The art in these pages and in the companion exhibition reminds us that individuals relate to the world from multiple subject positions, and that the influences on those subject positions are being radically reshaped – especially by networked-image technologies. And while there is a sense that the shared public space of politics is currently being overwhelmed by affective content, we are simultaneously witnessing a reinvigoration of the power of the collective and the resolve of communities. By making subjectivity a theme of their work, the eight artists and artist groups included here can help us imagine novel links between individual and collective experience.

Though their art takes varied forms, each artist makes images with – or uses images made by – cameras. For 150 years, the mechanical nature of the medium suggested a particular claim on documentary veracity, on “truth.” Today, viewing publics increasingly recognize photographs as subjective, rather than objective, documents. We know that pictures carry the biases of their makers, and that our interpretations of them reflect our biases in turn. New questions have arisen: how do we apportion our attention when our media feeds include traditional journalism, internet gossip, propaganda, fake news, and the opinions of friends and family? What is at stake when subjective criteria and utterances have entered the political environment on an unprecedented scale? These questions connect in fundamental ways with our understanding of the camera as subjective narrator and a technology of perception.

While some works in this issue question how personhood is defined, negotiated and legislated through photographic representation, others reflect on the discrepancy between physically grounded and immaterial ways of existing as humans, and on how deeply embedded we are in other life networks and ecologies. The self is no longer necessarily understood as singular; we acknowledge the extension and molding of subjectivity via screens and technologies and via myriad other practices: consuming, naming, performing, branding, liking, hosting, acting and, of course, recontextualizing.

Consider American artist Zoe Leonard’s recent photographs, presented in New York last year in an exhibition titled In the Wake. They depict family snapshots from the period after World War II when her forebears were stateless. The original images, taken as her family fled from Warsaw to Italy to London to the United States over the course of more than a decade, offer scenes of intimacy that contrast with the era’s international clashes and their messy aftermaths. Leonard, in re-photographing the originals, opted not to reconstruct lost moments, to close the gap between then and now. Instead, she examines the earlier photographs as printed objects that bear physical evidence of their own histories: we see scratches and other blemishes, edges of paper curling upward. Sometimes, too, Leonard aims her camera from an oblique angle, shrouding the original subject with a splash of reflected light and revealing a wavy postmark. (These objects made the same journeys as their subjects.) She flips one photograph to document its inscription. “It’s not that one sees less,” Leonard has explained of these works, “but that different information becomes visible.”

Leonard’s artworks are in the “wake” of the originals in multiple senses. A wake is the path behind a ship marked by choppy waters – a useful metaphor for migrants seeking safe harbor, as the pictures’ subjects are doing, or for the compositions, in which the originals “float” against featureless backgrounds. A wake is also the act of keeping watch with the dead, of meditating on lives as they were lived. For every migrant who forged a life in a new home, as did some of Leonard’s family members, there are others who could not. And to “wake” is to come to consciousness, to become alert to the world around you when before you were unaware. The narrative emphasis placed on their subjects’ statelessness ensures the pictures’ relevance in our present moment of geopolitical instability and its attendant migrations. These intimate pictures are linked to – awaken us to – some of the broadest and most pressing social concerns of the day. Many of the original pictures are bounded by thin white borders. By re-photographing them and placing them within this conceptual and narrative framework, Leonard ensures that the meanings they convey are not similarly restricted. We know little about the lives of the people depicted, the knowledge of which remains the province of Leonard and those close to her. But in imagining those stories, empathy compels us to relate at both intimate and grand scales.

In a 2011 interview, Brooklyn-based artist Deana Lawson, whose work one might not readily associate with Leonard’s, spoke about family albums:

I think that there is definitely something tragic in the family photograph – it’s a fundamentally retroactive idea. We make the image specifically to look back on it, to refer to it later in life. Even in my old family albums, the process of aging – the space between then and now – can be haunting and unstable. How to deal with the idea of projected time in a static medium is an interesting challenge.

Lawson describes the subjects of her photographs as “her family.” Given the seeming intimacy of her pictures, the term makes intuitive sense. But she is not related to them by blood; in fact, most are strangers cast for their roles by the artist, who plans each composition and arranges the many details. To date, she has done this work with subjects living in Haiti, Jamaica, Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of Congo, and in various parts of the United States. As the statement above suggests, Lawson uses the visual conventions of family albums merely as a starting point. “In my portrait work,” she says, “I am creating ... a theater of the family snapshot.”

The metaphor seems particularly apt: her compositions often function like proscenium stages on which her subjects perform their intimate gestures. They are pressed against a wall, or, if outdoors, against foliage or the blackness of night. Lawson usually points her camera directly at them and they stare back into the lens. This interaction feels matter-of-fact, rather than confrontational, and contributes to the pictures’ sense of candor. The small dramas that Lawson has scripted are about flesh, kinship, sex, rituals. She is attuned to Black self-fashioning, to traditions of representing Black bodies by non-Black artists, and to the interaction between these aesthetic programs. As the critic Greg Tate has noted, Lawson’s work “seems always [to be] about the desire to represent social intimacies that defy stereotype and pathology while subtly acknowledging the vitality of lives abandoned by the dominant social order.”

The constructed intimacy of Lawson’s pictures hints at a shift in our everyday use of cameras and our approach to photographs. Let’s call it “stage awareness.” We perform for the camera, as we always have. Then we manipulate our pictures, as has been common since the smartphone revolution. But now we distribute them through channels that do not let us assume the size or makeup of our audience. The dominant form of self-fashioning, thanks to networked distribution, is entirely public-facing; we create versions of ourselves meant for consumption by others both known and unknown. The source material in Zoe Leonard’s In the Wake artworks marked significant occasions for a specific set of people. That kind of intimacy no longer characterizes most of our photographs. The fact that they are objects, too, would be unusual now; images are currently printed less often than they are shared across screens. (This is another kind of passage or migration.) Today, we place our immaterial images in public venues and we respond to images by others created expressly to be circulated. We are only beginning to understand what this echo chamber of manipulated images suggests about how we relate to one another.

We know that, in the past, photographs produced for wide distribution were often altered to better reflect cultural norms. (Think of fashion-magazine covers.) Those alterations helped the images’ subjects fit more comfortably into networks of economic exchange. If altering our own pictures for others’ consumption is now a default practice, then the work of Brooklyn-based Canadian artist Sara Cwynar can help us to understand how the value of images shifts through circulation and across time. Cwynar gathers mass-produced objects and commercial images, often made during the 1960s and 70s, and recontextualizes them in her studio. She nestles physical objects alongside printed photographs of them, or of other materials. Then, through a laborious process of photographing, printing and e-photographing, she creates collage-like images that reflect upon consumer desires and the visual strategies used to stoke them. “Looking critically at not only mass-produced objects but also mass-produced modes of depiction is a kind of political project,” notes the artist in an interview in Objektiv 15.

The political implications of our visual rendering of the world is what unites the artists included in our exhibition, although in disparate ways. Sandra Mujinga reflects upon what she terms the “poly-body” in her investigations of the digital self. The collage project ALBUM by Eline Mugaas and Elise Storsveen offers a highly subjective take on photographic representations of gender, sex, and the concept of care. Liz Magic Laser uses the format of the TED Talk in a film installation featuring a ten-year-old actor delivering a monologue adapted from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground. In this way, her work relates the author’s attack on the socialist ideal of enlightened self-interest to contemporary capitalist thinking. Another film installation by Basma Alsharif addresses both the stateless self and mass-mediated representations of trauma on the Gaza Strip. Josephine Pryde speaks of a different form of displacement in her series It’s Not My Body, which superimposes found, low-resolution MRI scans of a human embryo in the womb against desert landscapes shot through tinted filters. She engages multiple definitions of “reproduction” and their impact on political debates about subjecthood and a woman’s right to choose.

We decided to include one artwork made during an earlier era, namely Zoe Leonard’s 1992 text I Want a President. When speaking about it in late 2016, the artist noted how her relationship to its call for a new politics has evolved. “On the one hand, I’m thrilled and gratified that something I made more than twenty years ago might still be considered relevant. At the same time, I am utterly horrified and saddened that these words still have such relevance.” She added: “I don’t think about identity politics in the same way – that is, I don’t think that a specific set of identifiers or demographic markers necessarily leads to a particular political position.” Having to acknowledge the uncoupling of political views and individual attributes seems to us a key development during the past twenty-five years. This complicates, rather than negates, identity politics, and the ways in which we produce and respond to images have played an important role in this evolution. Today, individual and collective identities are fluid, and the distances between them fluctuate. The artworks gathered help us to distinguish whether those distances are intellectual, emotional, or psychological. And, if we are open to them, they can illuminate the paths we navigate between self and society.

Our current issue, Subjektiv part II, invites different artists, curators and thinkers to give us their recent critical perspectives on the issues at stake and on the status of the subjective as an artistic strategy in the current political climate. Today's statement from Hannah Whitaker, who is part of the group show MILKSHAKE #3, curated for GOLSA (former Rod Bianco) by MELK, opening March 2 :

OMG That’s So Truuuuu.

Dismantling a photograph’s claim to truth is a favorite pastime of photography theorists. Recently, broader conversations around truth and fact are everywhere. Leftist intellectuals, normally favoring Baudrillard’s simulacrum to such pedestrian impulses as truth claiming, find themselves suddenly shouting the superiority of their facts to those claimed by the right. Indeed, normal knowledge systems are breaking down, and the photographic order has not been spared. Strangely, photography itself has played a crucial role in its own upending.

In spite of decades of fist-shaking at those who’d be so naïve as to conflate a thing with its image, to the broader public, the veracity of photography remains more or less intact. The New York Times associates the very word photograph with an implication of truth, designating images that have had any post-production as “photo-illustrations.” This way, for an image deemed sufficiently believable as to be called an actual photograph, one can be sure of the basic facts, or at least those conveyable by optical means.

However, even the simplest of truths are contentious of late. Donald Trump’s indifference to them is widely known. He brings new subjectivity to that which formerly felt like objective fact—that one number (the amount of people at his inauguration) is smaller than another number (the amount of people at Barack Obama’s inauguration). These quantities were estimated by crowd scientists using aerial photographs. That there can be any disagreement, however misguided, on these images, which were shot from approximately the same position at the same time of day, points to the slipperiness of deriving definitive information from photographs. Oddly, Trump’s refusal to believe these widely accepted conclusions make him an unlikely bedfellow for left-wing art theorists who dismiss the supremacy of photographic truth.

Hannah Whitaker, OK, 2017

Speaking of supremacy, right-wing Internet trolls (or, in pre-digital parlance, assholes) routinely take this ambivalence about accuracy a step further by falsely linking various innocuous symbols with white supremacy. Rather than simply denying or ignoring basics truths, they gleefully, nefariously manipulate the public. Symbols that they’ve attempted to associate with white supremacy include milk, the polar bear emoji, the peace sign, and the rainbow flag. In February 2017, an anonymous poster to 4chan launched “Operation O-KKK” by urging, “We must flood twitter and other social media websites with spam, claiming that the OK hand sign is a symbol of white supremacy. Make fake accounts with basic white girl names and type shit like OMG that’s so truuuuu.” The poster goes on to add, “Bonus points if your profile pic is something related to feminism.” (In addition to white supremacy, feminists—and how annoying they are—seem to be a fixation for 4chan tricksters. One suggests perpetrating the notion that clapping is “anti-feminist.”) Essential to the success and insidiousness of these hoaxes is that they employ visual, and therefore photographable, signs. The manipulation of the meaning of these signs allows any image, even those with totally apolitical intent, to be weaponized. Radical fringe groups can appear to communicate wordless solidarity, even if they aren’t actually doing so.

The Steerage by Alfred Stieglitz. This version was published in 1915.

Photographers who have long internalized a suspicion of photographic veracity traffic much more comfortably in symbols. Non-literal content, like metaphor or affect, is understood to be reliant on subject position and thus is spared from problematic claims to universal truths. However, since it is culturally dependent, it can easily be misunderstood. In his essay On the Invention of Photographic Meaning, Allan Sekula cites discourse as essential to even the possibility of meaning, which he defines as a “bounded area of shared expectations.” The limitations that enclose this arena allow for understanding. For example, in Alfred Steiglitz’ famous 1907 photograph, The Steerage, common knowledge about clothing indicates the presence of two distinct classes of people. This allows the photograph to stand in for something unphotographable, like an idea—in this case, economic inequality. But what to doMwhen the arena comes unbounded? Or when expectations are not only no longer shared, but explicitly undermined? Or when misunderstanding becomes not simply a possibility, but an inevitability by design?

Those of us invested in the idea that photographs can have meaning must ask ourselves these questions. It seems the systems for understanding even the types of content that admit to subjective contingency are breaking down. Like a photograph’s truth claim, its symbolic content is becoming tainted. Photographs are then not simply contingent on subjectivities that offer differing interpretations, they are becoming untethered from the structures that allow for meaning at all. They become utterly senseless, or aggressively meaningful, or both, or neither. Or perhaps meaning is simply quaint. For more understanding, we should all be directed to the Truth Claim (Photography)’s handy Wikipedia page, which features useful subsections entitled “Understanding of reality,” “potential for manipulation,” and “the continuing reality effect.” Perhaps “reality” is being used here as it is in “reality television”—that is, to mean its opposite. Or if not its opposite, then whatever you want it to mean.

Marseille-based artist Marie Bovo captured the depths of Russia from a train carriage in search of ordinariness. Interview by Anja Grøner Krogstad.

Anja Grøner:Why did you choose the name Cтансы (Stances) for your latest series?

Marie Bovo: I thought Stances was a good way to define this work, because on the one hand it refers to a stop, and on the other it recalls the term ‘stanza’ or verse. Every train station is a pause, and at the same time, every stop makes sense on its own as a frame and a place. Every stop represents a particular landscape and a distinct time of day.

For three weeks, I travelled on the slow local trains between St Petersburg and Murmansk. The process was the same every time: the train would stop for about 20 seconds, and because I never knew whether the doors would open on the right or left, the decision about where to point the camera had to be made in seconds. I used a view camera, which isn’t exactly the lightest, handiest camera out there, but the cold made it impossible to work digitally. The hardest part was at dusk, when the indoor lighting altered the perception of space, and the challenge was to transform the hostile metallic overhead lights into something golden.

AG: Stances was first shown in the Église des Trinitaires Church in Arles, then at OSL contemporary in Oslo, and now at Kamel Mennour in Paris. What are the important factors about a space when you show your work?

Picture from the installation of Stances by Marie Bovo at Église des Trinitaires Church in Arles. Courtesy the artist and OSL Contemporary.

MB: I always consider the relationship between the photograph and the exhibition space. While the gallery and the white cube is probably the most common space in which to present art today – and as such a neutral and extremely standardised one – the church in Arles was exactly the opposite. It was constructed as a religious place of worship, and those qualities remain, although the church is now desacralised. I found that really interesting for Stances, because previously I’ve explored how our relationship with the image differs from one culture to another. In the Western tradition, one of the first places in which we’re confronted with images is the religious space. In Russia, there’s a particular devotion linked to the icon. It’s a sacred image that serves as a link between the divine and the secular. When presented in a church, icons are hung in specific places to create a pathway, to accompany the spectator step by step and tell a story. And in Orthodox churches you have the iconostasis, a wall of icons and religious paintings that separates the nave from the sanctuary. I was inspired by this idea and decided to recreate an iconostasis in Arles. The icon is an entrance, a door that separates the holy and the profane, and the work I did in Russia is all about train doors opening and the relation between two spaces. At Kamel Mennour, I recreated that arrangement to make a wall of images.

AG: You consider the Mediterranean to be your base, and your earlier series are set in Cairo, Alger and Marseille, to name a few. What was it like working with cold scenery like this?

MB: I rediscovered Malevich’s oeuvre through the Russian landscape. During days of snow, the train would cross lakes that were several kilometres long, and I had the impression of being in a white mass. Malevich’s White on White and his way of thinking took on a new meaning for me.

AG: How did you interpret him before?

MB: I think in a more conceptual way, certainly one that was less sensitive and less sensual. Still, I remember seeing his work in group shows, and a Malevich would always draw me in from afar. There’s a return to figuration in his later work, but even his most abstract paintings bear a certain resemblance to the icon painting. While passing through that white mass of snow, it was as if the landscape took on a new dimension. And that’s not conceptualism; it’s literally a physical experience.

AG: You went to art school and initially wanted to become a sculptor. You’ve often incorporated literature and other art forms into your work. So did any other artists or writers nourish this series?

MB: Literature was particularly important to get a deeper understanding of Russia. I read everything from the classics such as Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, to Mandelstam, Solzhenitsyn and contemporary authors like Andrei Gelasimov. I read a beautiful text on drawing by Gelasimov called Thirst. It tells the story of a young man who’s sent to Chechnya and comes back completely disfigured. All his former facial features are gone, and the book is about how he learns how to draw and search for new traits. It’s a profound reflection on drawing, on form, figuration and disfiguration. All these different books allowed me to plunge into Russia’s history, but each time through the perception of the author. It was very educational.

AG: And what did you learn about Russia?

MB: I think European history was largely written in the margins. Take the city of Königsberg, the birthplace of Kant, as an example. Today, it’s the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, and when you look at it on a map you almost have the impression that it’s not in Europe, whereas in the eighteenth century, this was a centre for the Enlightenment movement situated right in the heart of Europe. Culture grows and matures in the margins and Russia is interesting in that regard because it constantly interrogates us on the question of being inside or outside.

AG: The human presence is always evoked in these works but never in a direct manner: we see no one, but we see a trace. Why?

MB: A human presence immediately creates anecdotes. No matter what you look at, the presence of a person always takes centre stage; it becomes the architecture or the place of someone. The absence of humans is disorienting, which is why the trace is interesting. Besides, the places I travelled through were practically deserted. In France we say that from each village church tower you can see the next village church tower. In Russia that’s simply not possible.

AG: Is it a goal to travel to as many places as possible? Is there a place you’d never set foot in?

MB: It depends, but there are places I feel more concerned with than others. I prefer Russian literature to American literature, for instance. I know the work of famous American authors, but it quickly ceases to interest me because I feel like it doesn’t concern me. There are definitely places that inspire me more than others because I already have an interior dialogue with them through literature. I recognised several familiar elements in Russian literature and painting where I didn’t expect to find them at all. Reading Mandelstam was one the first times I read poems about Odysseus, for example.

Perhaps it has to do with the fact that American culture has become so dominant, even in art history. After World War II there’s an imposition of an art history centred on the United States, which is an interpretation that should be criticised, or at least relativised. At the same time, I don’t think one should fall too deeply in love with Russia either. We need to stay aware of the negative aspects. To love the country is one thing, but to be in love with it is different.

Drawing Connections

Tomorrow sees the screening of films by the artists Christine Rebet and Basma Alsharif at Caro Sposo in Paris.Basma Alsharif here in conversation with Christine Rebet on their work and how the collective is a way to affirm your position in the present.

BASMA ALSHARIF In my most recent piece, Comfortable in our New Homes, I use the concept of the “eternal return” as a way to bring together disparate landscapes and people. It’s as a way of fusing the Gaza Strip with other parts of the world and to ask questions about civilisation and humanity – though fairly indirectly. This is something I do in a lot of my works (bringing disparate locations and ideas together), just as I think curiosity is a huge part of what drives my interests: wanting to find out how certain thing will work together, or not. With this piece, I had a political agenda, but I also very clearly knew that I wanted to move beyond my own subjective inquiries and desires. And yet I found that impossible: how does one separate oneself from the work one makes? I'm curious to know how you think about this in your work.

CHRISTINE REBET I believe there’s a personal take on any event. What triggers our thoughts could be both personal and political. The closer we are to a personal tale, the more collective it can become. When we start a work, I believe it’s important to delve into the subject deeply to find the backbone of what matters. I understood it in making the animation In the Soldier's Head. I delve into the very intimate and painful subject of the traumatised psyche of a soldier during the Algerian war. The film mines the collective terrain of a colonised landscape and mind. I’m French and I’ve questioned the past of my country. I come from a country that has colonised many other countries. It’s a reverse.

BA What do you mean a reverse?

CR It’s going in reverse in the sense of observing colonisation from a different perspective. As a kid I grew up with political refugees and have developed sensitivities towards the history and origin of displacement.

BA Is it curiosity?

CR Curiosity, and I enjoy the exchange as well.

BA What made you this way ?

CR It comes from my family: they taught me from a very young age to respect everybody. I never felt disconnected from kids who came from different parts of the world.

BA You've spoken about you how you’re from a colonising country. In In the Soldier’s Head you talk about your father, a soldier in Algeria who then suffered from PTSD. You reveal that you bonded with his experience when you suffered hallucinations from malaria fever, ultimately leading you to make the work you did. Can you tell me a bit more about this?

Christine Rebet, In the Soldier’s Head, 2015

CR During the fever your body and psyche change, you almost shift into a third person. Similarly, when making an animation, your mind reaches another state. It’s deep.

BA Because of the nature of animation being a slower process?

CR Because it’s very repetitive and you have to commit to your subject and embrace the consequences for a long period of time. Although I’d been thinking about this work for a while, I was only predisposed to commit to it after contracting malaria. As I was hallucinating, I was somehow dispossessed from my mind and body.

BA What do you make of having had this experience in a foreign place, and not in France? I’m curious to know whether or not you needed to be removed from home in order to have such an experience.

CR I’ve always felt removed from my own country, as if my mind is a foreign land. I’ve built a second language that has been hosting my imagination.

BA I think I know what you mean. I’ve always felt like a stranger everywhere. It's a very deep feeling of knowing one doesn’t belong anywhere because one's identity is so closely connected with the culture of the place one grows up in. But the trick is that we’re all in a way foreign to the earth. These are human experiences that I imagine almost everyone has thought: why was I born to these people and why are these my siblings? Why was I born in this city or this country? How similar am I to other people here? But then, if we really think about it, we’re foreign to the earth and that somehow connects us all. It may sound simple or naive, but I was after something like this in my film: to connect different histories, landscapes, people – not to say "We are the world", but just "Here we are".

CR I totally agree with all of this. I believe there’s a multiplayer locus linking different places, histories and momentums together. It could be a trajectory connecting real locations with imagined spaces, real instances to fictitious ones, memory to its spectre. When I look at your work, that’s what I see.

BA And yours removes time from space. We’re in a space where time is no longer a function.

CR A space where time could be reassessed.

BA You started with drawings and then you morphed them into animation for In The Soldier's Head, right? How did this decision come about? Had you worked in animation before?

CR I’d worked in animation for about ten years. When I draw I can choose whether it’s a singular narrative or a film. In the Soldier's Head appeared as I drew a cave entitled Shadows of Family Tree. The cave buried a secret. We never found the site of the hospital where my father was sent during the war. The military administration never revealed its location. From the drawing came an urgent desire to exhume the journey of my father' s troubled mind and an invitation to grieve for collectively colonised minds.

Christine Rebet, Shadows of Family Tree.

BA Do you feel as if this work speaks to a certain political environment in France today?

CR Yes, it was in response to today’s political environment that I started interrogating French society's denial of its colonial history. I’m interested in the fragile terrain of dispossession. I want to animate what’s uncomfortable, unnameable, unspoken, whether it’s trauma, violence, colonisation or domination.

BA Do you question that in your work?

CR In my own and through others. When I joined the Columbia MFA I wanted to extend film further into the subconscious of collective agency through live action, performativity and social sculpture. In an echo of the Arab Spring uprising, I constructed The Square, a film/monument enacting the movements of civil union and revolt found in public squares. It’s a reinvented narrative of existing locations.For example, the lost and violent territory of In the Soldier’s Head is reinvented from my father's biography. This location exists, yet its real geographical placement is unknown.

BA We can only understand where we are, based on our understanding of being the most important beings on the planet. We can only understand the earth in relation to ourselves. Even if we say that there’s a vast, empty landscape that exists where there are no humans, it’s still a human conception. And archaeology, the unearthing of this history, is an affirmation of our own importance: to say “We did this.” When people speak like this – we built churches, and we made pots or jewelery – you think, “We didn’t do that. That was some other person in another space and time.” A person of whom we have no true conception, and it’s all in our imagination. It seems to serve an affirmative purpose and is a desperate grasping at our own importance. And actually I think that in In the Soldiers Head you’re using our connection to each other through trauma.

CR I think the connection I have in the film is in the form of trauma, fantasy, hallucination, dream and spectres. In early works, I borrowed those forms from the optical illusions of the pre-cinematic landscape. In the Soldier's Head is conceived as a deceptive apparatus to parody the hypocritical and violent machinery of the imperialist agenda. The trauma is channelled through the constant rapture and disruption of hallucinations and mirages. It’s already a projection. It’s both embedded in the earth and magnified as a projection, horizontal and vertical.

BA We’re much more comfortable knowing that another civilisation or nation could destroy us than thinking that we could be wiped out in the blink of an eye by a natural disaster. Palestinians were a people before the occupation, but as far as the modern construction of "identity" is concerned, our identity is wrapped up in being oppressed by Israel. And that’s a terrible thing, but the real terror is knowing that something without logic could wipe us out and we wouldn't be given a chance to write history books to explain why we ended up where we are.

CR The Middle East has been subject to so much destruction, war and pillage. For so many years, civilisations have built resistant traditions to survive erasure, disfiguration, colonisation. Some societies developed a belief in immutability through history, memory, public edifice. It’s so powerful. It’s because they knew that the world experiences this continuous destruction. What a terrible and horrifying fate!

BA Both in the drawing and animations, you creates your own language. You make images that aren’t necessarily opaque or hard to read, but at the same time I feel like my brain is working, my eyes are actively reading both the still and moving drawings. The drawings feel like artefacts out of time, and for me, that’s very much about how we exist: in a perpetual cycle of positive and negative. The only way to survive is to forget, but forgetting means repeating the same mistakes over and over again. This is a central idea that I’m obsessed with in making my work.

Christine Rebet, Thunderbird, 2018

CR I’m shocked to see that racism in France has become a normalised situation. Palestine is the same.

BA Yes, it’s not unique. There have been conflicts since there have been people.

CR What’s important is that we keep using our form of expression, that we sharpen our critical tools, making sure we’re still growing as part of a discursive, socio-poetic space, challenging consensus.

BA Our greatest resistance is to not martyr ourselves for our work, but to continue. In the art world, even when you have pieces that are intentionally violent or depressing, the ones that stand out for me are those with something else in them: a little bit of tooth, sarcasm, irony, or even just beauty that’s self-aware. It's the straightforward lamenting that I’m not interested in at all. I like this about your work – that there’s this immediate pleasure, because your work is very beautiful, and that’s the first thing you see and then you’re brought into this other world, this other meaning. And that makes me question the experience of pleasure in an idea that’s not inherently pleasurable. For me, art doesn’t seem like the first line of resistance or activism, but it’s always felt very important because it involves more than just the first reaction. It reflects and reinvents. It may not feel as if an artwork reaches the world beyond the museum walls, but I believe the entire process around the production of the work that brought it to the museum is as important as the final product.

CR. How to address the tumult of the world? How to exorcise the memory of suffering souls? The aura of collective horror? I like to approach film as a collective monument where the after-image revives its own remnants in a poignant and eternal presence. I don’t know whether or not it’ll have an impact in the museum. I’m just thinking it’s important to come up with something that’s true, and then you’ll find out if it’s right.

BA Through how an audience engages with the work?

CR My works may be abstract and you might not understand the narrative, but I treat research and subject with passion, humour and candour. I drew my dad when he died, outlined the contour of his soul, and these delicate lines are still alive. I hope I can share this directness and awakeness in my films.

BA Do you think of it as a collective experience? In my mind, the collective produces an awareness of oneself. A collective where everything is shared is a false idea, or can only be temporary because it relies too much on the individual to make it work. But collectives happen all over the place, without intentionality, and it’s when collectivity is hindered that we suffer. I think about art in the same way, I guess – in it's interconnectedness with everything.

CR I like to think of it as a kinetic monument addressing a transforming contemporaneity. We have all sorts of live collective exchange.

BA The collective is also a way to affirm your position in the present.

CR Wherever you are, especially now, you have to learn how to survive through the present.

The Art of Publishing: An Exhibition of MACK Books. Review by Kate Warren

The Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne, Australia, has recently mounted a number of exhibitions that engage critically with pressing questions around the nature of curating photography, and the contemporary status of the “image”. Their 2017 show An unorthodox flow of images was a purposeful challenge to established norms of exhibiting photography, presenting an intriguing and meandering “thread” of connected images and photographic objects. In 2016 they hosted David Campany’s exhibition Walker Evans: The Magazine Work, which explored the boundaries between fine art, documentary and commercial photography. With this in mind, I had high hopes for their recent exhibition The Art of Publishing: An Exhibition of MACK Books. Anyone with a passing knowledge of contemporary photography will know of the surge of interest in photobook publishing, with London-based publisher MACK being at the forefront. With the exhibition’s promise of “more than 200 books, editions and related objects” – including many rare and out of print editions – I had envisioned CCP’s galleries being transformed into a library-style space of contemplation and engagement. I came away feeling somewhat disappointed. The exhibition proved to be a rich and comprehensive overview of MACK’s output, covering their profound influence and ongoing relationships with significant artists. Yet overall it felt like a missed opportunity to explore the phenomenon of photobook and art-book publishing more broadly.

It goes without saying that any gallery-based exhibition of books is inherently challenging. The materiality of books clashes with traditional museological standards of display, which presume a “no touching” approach. When books are exhibited in cases or vitrines, only the briefest snippet of their content is visible. Digital technologies have provided expanded opportunities to reproduce and exhibit books in their entirety, through touch-screens and interactive devices. However these remove the physicality of the books as objects. The fact that paper book sales continue to increase compared with ebooks attests to the value that people still ascribe to the physical experience of reading. In today’s world of digital photography and networked photosharing platforms, the relationship between the photograph as physical object and the photograph as image is a nexus of much debate. Photobooks occupy a unique position in this contemporary dialectic as their status as valuable objects of fine art increases.

The material quality of photobooks as objects was the clear focus of The Art of Publishing. The exhibition was curated by MACK founder Michael Mack and Melbourne-based publisher Dan Rule, Director of Perimeter Books. The show’s key point of difference from other similar exhibitions was having the publications readily available to be held and touched. Books were displayed on the walls of CCP’s galleries on discrete shelves, ready to be taken down and read. Different books by the same photographer were displayed on the same shelf to convey either the aesthetic consistency or diversity of their visual designs. Other groupings combined related materials, such as photographic editions and visual mock-ups, including one impressive example from Adam Broomberg + Oliver Chanarin’s Holy Bible (2013).

A number of write-ups of The Art of Publishing emphasised this unique opportunity to experience the tactile nature of these publications, “giving prominence to the book as an artwork in itself”. In a related interview Michael Mack also made this point, stating that the “fundamental thing about [the exhibition] is that it includes some now very expensive objects that people can go and touch”. However touching and handling a book is only one element of the equation. What is most interesting about photobooks is not simply their physicality and their design processes, but rather the relationship between that physicality and their visual and/or textual content. The exhibition at CCP privileged the former, while neglected to fully accommodate the latter for visitors.

While I had imagined a library construct, The Art of Publishing adopted a bookshop mode of presentation (and indeed all books on display were available for purchase through Perimeter Books). With only two standard gallery-style benches in the exhibition, sitting down to spend extended time with the books proved challenging. This largely forced visitors to flick through the books while standing up, or to uncomfortably balance large books on their knees. Some of the books on display benefitted from this fleeting and flicking approach, such as Paul Graham’s 12-book series a shimmer of possibility (2007). With each book presenting short, interspersed photographic sequences of everyday life, the small differences between images subtly recalled the tradition of “flip-books”, precursors to moving images and filmic narration. Understated differences in visual composition also characterised Mark Ruwedel’s absorbing book Message from the Exterior (2016), which documents abandoned houses in Californian desert regions. On a very different level, Alec Soth’s Gathered Leaves (2015) was also a highlight. Social documentary and portraiture are popular themes for photobook creators, however Soth’s special edition thoughtfully used his books’ physicality to capture something extra about this genre. Reproducing mini facsimile versions of some of Soth’s books, including the influential Sleeping by the Mississippi, these small handheld editions poetically recalled family photo albums, giving an intimate viewing experience.

These highlights notwithstanding, The Art of Publishing would have benefitted from more thorough curatorial and exhibition design strategies to engage with the specifics of a gallery space. In this way it could have responded to the depth of its objects more individually. Space is always at a premium in galleries, but the exhibition cried out for a more imaginative use of seating and visitor engagement – perhaps a dedicated reading spot, some armchairs, desks or tables on which to sit for longer periods, and perhaps compare different books. As a reviewer, I am wary of focusing on quibbles of presentation and display; it can be a shortcut to avoid engaging with the deeper conceptual underpinnings of an exhibition. But questions of access are important, and certainly anyone with mobility impairment would have struggled to reach many of the books on higher shelves. Moreover, the exhibition’s presentational choices cut deeper than physical access – they went to the heart of the show’s conceptualisation of its content.

Many of the books on display were not well served by the curatorial design and lay-out. Tacita Dean’s Buon Fresco (2016) featured generous reproductions of Giotto’s thirteenth-century fresco cycle in the Basilica of San Francesco d’Assisi, filmed up-close with a macro-lens. The large special edition, printed on photorag paper, felt awkward and cumbersome to flick through while standing up. Taking in the depth and detail of Mark Dion’s Oceanomania (2011) was difficult, a rich a publication developed from the artist’s research in the collections of the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco and the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, through which he created the largest ever curiosity cabinet of the sea. As beautifully presented as Joan Fontcuberta’s The Photography of Nature & The Nature of Photography (2013) and Pandora’s Camera (2014) were, reading the numerous essays in the collections felt out of the question.

Thus one of the consequences of over-emphasising the books’ design and materiality was that The Art of Publishing neglected to fully present or underline the individual books’ content and contexts. It is part of a trend that photography theorist Melissa Miles recognised some years ago, as scholarly and curatorial responses to photobooks often “tend to focus on the books’ formal characteristics […] rather than their particular epistemological or ontological implications”. Formalism and minimalism characterised the exhibition’s display. With a few exceptions, all the books were displayed uniformly – on the same types of shelves, at slightly varying heights. Ironically, this uniformity of display actually negated the physicality of some of its key examples. Thomas Demand’s publication The Dailies was the most obvious example. Having visited Demand’s project in Sydney in 2012, I understood that the impressive publication was designed in tandem with the site-specific nature of the project. The book’s concertina design mimicked the circular architecture of the Commercial Travellers’ Association building, around which the original exhibition was conceived. This crucial aspect was all but obscured in the exhibition, reducing this publication to an almost purely decorative object.

Held for a short period of time during the usually quiet summer month of January, The Art of Publishing was an experiment in developing audiences and partnerships. In this sense it was clearly a success, and its public program series included a packed lecture by Michael Mack, reinforcing the dedicated audience for MACK books and photobooks in general. Therefore, the abiding impression that I came away with was the potential and scope for a truly experimental exhibition on this topic. CCP is an organisation that punches above its weight; it is clearly invested in the critical understanding and interrogation of the nature and consumption of photography and images, from emerging to established practitioners and scholars. Indeed some of the most compelling examples in the exhibition were the collection of titles from the First Book Award. Sofia Borges’ The Swamp (2016) was especially imaginative in its connections between image and text. I would love to see CCP mount an exhibition that investigates the phenomenon of the photobook more holistically; it could be an opportunity to thoroughly unpack and explore the complex contemporary relations between photography, text, materiality, and images.

I think of myself as a robber. I plunder and pillage on paper. I possess these things and give them my own meaning. - Sarah Charlesworth

Throughout her artistic career, from the late 1970s until she passed away in 2013, Sarah Charlesworth plunged into the vast sea of omnipresent imagery that constantly threatens to devour us – and took control. She collected, dissected and reappropriated images cut from fashion magazines and science journals, from art history books and newspapers, into works that are at once sophisticated and somber, elegant and elegiac. According to Hal Foster, hers is ‘an art that looks good and hurts a little’. Her precise and serene investigations into the historical, cultural and emotional meaning of photography still appear bold, fresh and imminently contemporary.

The artist’s first large solo presentation entitled Sarah Charlesworth: Doubleworld at the New Museum can now be seen until February the 4th at LACMA. In spite of her extraordinary contribution to the image world of the Picture Generation, her name never became household or incorporated into the great canon of contemporary American photography quite like her peers Sherrie Levine, Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman. Yet it is apparent that her influence on contemporary photographic practices has been profound and far-reaching. Furthermore, her work resonates deeply with a range of artists working with the potency and impotency of images, from John Baldessari to Elad Lassry.

Like other members of the Picture Generation in the late 70s and 80s, Charlesworth put photography right at the centre of the artistic debate, making it the very subject of her images. As she herself expressed: ‘I don’t think of myself as a photographer ... it is an engagement with a problem rather than a medium.’ The impact of images on our everyday lives and how they shape our personal and social identities were key matters for the group. Yet Charlesworth took this a step further by engaging so precisely and profoundly with the image surface itself.

Sarah Charlesworth: Doubleworld, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, on view through February 4, 2018.

Her method was to subtract or strip the images of every reference to their original context, focusing on their formal qualities, such as colour, shape and surface. The inherently fetishised quality of images thus came to the fore, but also the ideological undertow lurking beneath every image surface. Few did this quite as sharply or as deadpan as Charlesworth. And rarely is it more emotionally gripping than in the falling figures in the Stills series (1980), or more seductive than in the Objects of Desire series (1983–88). The latter are colour-saturated collages of appropriated images depicting often fetishised items: religious, cultural or exotic artifacts, animals, female bodies. The images are photographed against bright, monochrome backgrounds with matching lacquered frames. The artist thereby creates an interaction between surface and illusion, abstraction and figuration, highlighting the object-quality of the pictures. It is as if she wishes to conjure up the very essence of photography as it hovers between surface and depth, object and illusion, presentation and representation. And, in Charlesworth’s case, between warm and cold, since her work appears so flamingly engaged with the emotional impact of photographic images, yet at the same time reveals their chillingly numbing surface quality.

To revisit Sarah Charlesworth’s art is an instant diving lesson into the lives and loves of images, a lesson not to be missed.

Earlier this week, an Instagram account dedicated to sharing artifacts and ephemera of queer history, @LGBT_History, reported that their post sharing Zoe Leonard's work I Want a President was flagged and removed. They quickly reposted the poem, encouraging followers to repost. Afterwards, numerous artist have posted this important work on Instagram, only to have it removed. We hereby want to repost the poem, and at the same time want to remind you that Leonard’s poem is part of our exhibition Subjektiv and can be collected for free. Three days left.

Subjektiv part II invites different artists, curators and thinkers to give us their recent critical perspectives on the issues at stake and on the status of the subjective as an artistic strategy in the current political climate. Today's statement from Hinde Haest: Photography has been considered both the epitome of truthful representation and the most treacherously manipulative of mediums. The relation of the photograph to reality is highly paradoxical; its truthfulness has been contested from the outset. The more advanced our contemporary imaging technologies become, the more we trust its observation over our own. Of course, the more advanced our imaging technologies become, the more elaborate and immeasurable is the potential to create our own visually constructed versions of reality. In this scenario the photographer is both humbly subjected to the technological eye, while simultaneously subjecting it to his or her imagination. This schizophrenia makes the photograph both the most objective and subjective of mediums.

What we tend to forget, even if we consider photography an objective medium, is that it is just that: a medium, a moderator that only presents the truth it is being fed. Since photography’s infancy, it is artists who have come closest to fathoming the paradoxical quality of the medium and tapped its true potential: to use reality to imagine alternative worlds as if they were real. In 1858, Henry Peach Robinson’s staged image of a dying girl caused public outrage. Not because the girl in the picture was dead, but because she was not dead while a recording technology clearly demonstrated she was. The truth value of technologically mediated reality - and an understanding of the photograph as a “chemical and physical process that allows nature to reproduce herself” (Daguerre) or a "pencil of nature” (Talbot) – was broken irreparably.

Nearly two centuries later, we seem none the wiser. The nineteenth-century celebration of imaging technology as the objective bearer of truth persistently trumps a collective distrust in our own observations. And it is still artists who demonstrate that imaging tools do not only allow us to replicate reality, but also to reinvent and recompose it, for better or for worse. A complicating factor (and unprecedented opportunity) for the current generation of photographers is the accelerated speed at which images are being created and circulated online, a development that has invested the photograph with additional subjectivity that transcends the depicted. The power – and vulnerability – of the image is increasingly determined by the frequency with which it is being shared, the networks it travels and the context in which it is perceived.

Clément Lambelet, Happiness is the only true emotion, 2016

Amid the exponential number of images we are exposed to, we can only observe so much. What we see and fail to see is largely curated by technology. Big-data analysis, visual-recognition technologies, and algorithms increasingly determine who sees which image in which context. Contemporary artists working with photography are increasingly concerned not with what is depicted, but with how the depicted finds its way to the beholder. For example, Swiss artist Clément Lambelet investigates advancing algorithmic ecosystems. The artist scrutinizes the objectivity of the image at a time of rapidly developing computer-vision technologies and increasingly automated forms of surveillance. Instead of discarding such technologies as flawed, he repurposes them to expose previously unnoticed inconsistencies. For Collateral Visions (2016-ongoing)the artist scours found US Army footage for details accidentally captured by the lens, such as two donkeys peacefully grazing amid a US drone strike on an IS target. In Happiness Is the Only True Emotion (2016), Lambelet questions the reduction of bodies to digits by showing algorithms can be functionally prejudiced. The work examines the failings of emotion-recognition technologies, which only ever identify happiness.

Lambelet puts his finger on some of the fundamental questions about contemporary methods of representation. What is not shared or seen can be more influential in defining how we perceive the world than the information that does enter our peripheral sight. Lambelet’s algorithm can only identify happiness because it primarily learns from images depicting happiness. This does not mean the algorithm is defective, or that sadness does not exist. It simply proves that imaging technologies are as subjective as the realities they are being fed.

One question that follows is whether anything we see online is real. By “real” I do not mean factual, but rather what an image (whether true or false) can tell us about ourselves. As Hito Steyerl aptly put it in a conversation with Marvin Jordan for DIS Magazine: “Everyone has to be seen and heard, and has to be realized online as some sort of meta noise in which everyone is monologuing incessantly, and no one is listening. Aesthetically, one might describe this condition as opacity in broad daylight: you could see anything, but what exactly and why is quite unclear.” A number of artists are attempting to distil a contemporary human condition from the continuous, collective digital trail of visual information that people leave on the internet. It is a megalomanic undertaking that resonates with the humanist photography of the postwar period, kindled by a belief in a shared experience of what it is to be human.

Thomas Kuijpers, Find shelter! (The Rain Started), 2017

Rather than mapping humanity through ethnographic or anthropometric visualization—a technique alarmingly resonant with contemporary facial-recognition technology—the humanists employed photography to depict people as they loved, grieved, played, and fought. Come the digital age, the photographic image connects people worldwide more than ever, and our visual language has become increasingly emotive and subject to careful construction and curation. However, the subjectivity of the image today does not mean it is untrustworthy. If anything, it reveals more (often uncomfortable) truths about us and the ways we perceive the world. For the work Bad Trip (2017) Dutch artist Thomas Kuijpers analyzed the circulation of online imagery in an attempt to pinpoint the visual fundamentals of the most primal human emotion: fear. He amassed an archive of publications’ front pages, sensationalist headlines, and popular images that kindle a collective fear of terrorism. He ventured into the fringes of the web, tracking the posts of several anti-Islamic communities to study the kind of information their members consume. In an attempt to retrace what exactly inspires his own angst, he filmed and photographed situations in his daily life that triggered associations with terrorism. By collecting and deconstructing the visual make-up of a shared paranoia, Kuijpers questions how our perception of reality is conditioned largely by sensationalism, fake news, and irrational fears.

Lambelet and Kuijpers demonstrate how our consumption of images is increasingly based on knowledge drawn from existing information. Algorithms present us with the future, but they only learn from the past. Such visual self-reference was cleverly examined by David Horvitz. Inspired by Bas Jan Ader's 1971 video I’m too Sad to Tell You, Horvitz uploaded a stock image of himself with his head in his hands and kept an inventory of how the image made its way on to various websites as an illustration of depression and myriad other mental states. Horvitz’s sadness only acquires meaning after it has been bought or otherwise appropriated and placed in context. The image (signifier) thus precedes its meaning (signified). With his work, Horvitz not only points us toward the deplorable human condition manifested in collective depression and fatigue; he also inverts the truth that lies embedded in code by reclaiming the imaginative power of the reproducible image, as had Henry Peach Robinson in the nineteenth century.

Patrick Nagatani, Novellas (1992-1997)

byMatthew Rana

Last spring, I became fascinated by Novellas (1992-97), a series of 30 or so images by my former professor of photography at the University of New Mexico, Patrick Nagatani. At the time, media was abuzz with talk of ‘fake news’, and the assaults on journalism then being made by the American president, and his now-former press secretary Sean Spicer.

Although this body of work was made over two decades ago during the high phase of postmodernism, its concerns around the way that truth is constructed resonated deeply. Its critical engagement that is, with the photographic image as a composite of interwoven narratives and suspensions of disbelief, felt timely and urgent against the backdrop of a politics increasingly stranger than fiction.

Like much of Patrick’s work, Novellas evokes the spectacular, media-saturated landscape of late capitalism. But unlike his better-known directorial projects, such as the collaborations between 1983 and 1989 with painter Andrée Tracey, which stage fictional scenarios in elaborate, often ambiguous tableaus, the Novellas are more collage-like in their approach. Using a variety of mediums and techniques to create densely layered compositions, they incorporate a broad range of imagery including advertisements, film stills, religious etchings and archival photographs.

As the title suggests, each image reads like fiction — a page or passage in a short story. Yet whereas Patrick’s other projects from the same period, such as Nuclear Enchantment (1988-93), Japanese-American Concentration Camps (1993-95), or Ryoichi Excavations (1985-2000), tend to cohere around a single theme, history or character, Novellas is more fragmented, and plays out on a distinctly personal register, exploring themes such as sexuality, spirituality, race and gender; symbolic anchor points of the self.

I was saddened to learn of Patrick’s passing last October, at the age of 72, following a decade-long battle with colon cancer. As way to remember his artistic legacy and vision, I want to offer a selection of his Novellas here: a sequence of five large-format Polaroids from 1994 in which covers from the now-defunct publication Weekly World News — a supermarket tabloid known for outlandishly manipulated photographs claiming to depict supernatural and paranormal phenomena — feature. Also appearing in each image, a $5 novelty photograph in which Patrick’s head is digitally superimposed atop a figure shaking hands with then-president Bill Clinton. The dissonance that these images create still feels oddly synchronous with, for instance, the curious mix of faith and paranoia that seems to structure the American imagination at present. They are Amazing, Divine, Miraculous, Spectacular, and Terrifying.

My Naam is Februarie: Identities Rooted in Slavery from the Iziko Museums of South Africa aims to memorialize the forgotten history of the South African slave trade. The exhibition is part of the Slave Calendar, which was produced by Geometry Global. Through the calendar Iziko and Geometry wanted to highlight an important aspect of the Cape’s history – one that remains a mystery to many. Cape Town has many people with calendar-based surnames with September, October and November being the most common. Not many know why this is so. The exhibition features portraits of descendants from people who, between 1653 and 1808, were brought to the Cape as slaves, mostly from Indian Ocean countries. Upon arrival they were stripped of their names and renamed after the name of the month they arrived. The exhibition features a documentary film and twelve black and white portraits of descendants, framed as an outsized calendar. Each month pictures a person carrying that month’s name, from John January to Regina December. Though the context is historic South Africa, we know that slavery is not a thing of the past and it is easy to draw a line to the trafficking and slavery that is still taking place around the world today. My hope is that the exhibition gets to travel and be seen by many more people around the world. I cannot think of a more honest or gentle way to start a conversation about who we are as humans and how we see our shared future. Interview by Johanne Eriksen

JE: The aim of your exhibition is to facilitate dialogue on how our often forgotten and neglected past has shaped your identity in South Africa, Africa, and the African Diaspora. My Naam is Februarie channels what I imagine to be the country’s collectively mixed emotions in relation to this part of history, the shame, vulnerability and also the triumph of human spirit. Somehow my difficulties actually finding the exhibition made sense, with the exhibition shedding light on names that have been a mystery to many and a painful memory dating far back in history, not easy to access. In taking up this narrative you wish to pay tribute to the thousands of people forcibly uprooted from their homes in various parts of Africa and Asia, who were brought to the Cape and whose labour contributed to the building of South Africa’s cities, towns, and farms. How did the idea for the calendar happen, who initiated it and the exhibition My Naam is Februarie, could you tell us about the process?

Gavin Wood, creative director Geometry Global: The beginning of the idea for the calendar came from a visit to the Iziko Slave Lodge Museum where I learnt about origins of calendar based surnames in Cape Town. I had never thought what the origins could have been, and yet I had seen many examples from the South African Springbok rugby player, Rickie January, to my colleague Clive April. I am a creative director in advertising, and have always wanted to create something beautiful and meaningful, something that gets people talking or enlightened. I wondered if it existed 12 calendar based surnames in South Africa, and what their stories could be. I pitched the idea of a calendar to the advertising agency I work for, Geometry Global, and they loved it so much that they were prepared to find money to make it happen. I reached out to Paul Tichmann and Lynn Abrahams at Iziko Museums and got their backing to make the idea happen. What followed next was 3 months of research, cold calls, and Facebook-stalking to track down all 12 candidates. We then managed to secure the services from David Prior, who is one of South Africa’s best awarded photographers to do the portraits completely pro bono. He loved the idea and wanted to help bring it to life. The other photographer who was involved originally was David Southwood. The 12 films featured in the exhibition were shot by Brad Theron. He filmed my interviews with the candidates as we took the original portraits with David Southwood at their homes. All fell in love with the concept and wanted to be involved. They all did it for Geometry Global for a fraction of their normal fee. This project was a real labour of love, and we used all the skills at Geometry Global and from our partners at Ogilvy & Mather to produce the most beautiful calendar we possibly could. We then gave it to Iziko to do with it what they wanted. The calendar created quite a stir, and together with Iziko we decided should be an exhibition.

JE: In these times, projects like this must be made. How has the reactions been with the audience? And has the exhibition engaged people to do more, has there been other events in relation to the exhibition?

Lynn Abrahams, Iziko Museums of South Africa: This exhibition was initially scheduled to be exhibited from 20 October 2016 to 31 March 2017 but because it’s been so popular, it has been extended again to 31 March 2018. The exhibition has been described by visitors as:” very important, informative, a “moving experience”, powerful, “enriching experience” , “remarkable and moving”, amazing, enlightening, inspiring, thought provoking, eye-opening”. Visitors viewed it as a remarkable memorial but also very painful and informative at the same time. I suppose we wanted to create dialogue and confront people’s views and opinions of how they perceive themselves today.

Berlin based artist Daniel Gustav Cramer brings together distinct space considerations, synthesising abstractions drawn from the artist’s personal experiences in his show Five Days, on now at Entrée in Bergen. Interview by Tiago Bom

Tiago Bom: Your exhibition Five Days, at Entrée, relates to different instances in your life; aesthetic considerations drawn from personal experiences. To start with the title, what does it relate to?

Daniel Gustav Cramer: The title Five Days suggests a temporal space, five moments and scenes. I wanted to bring together two parts: One is the experience of the exhibition itself, being in the space. The elements in the space are abstract and somewhat restrained, certain forms are echoed throughout, the way colours, forms and proportions are used to create a dialog between objects and images. There is a particular stillness surrounding the works.

The second part are the journeys reflected in the individual works. Each work suggests a different tale. When you think of these stories coming together, overlaying, the show begins to shift.The works in the exhibition describe scenes in a desert in Southern California, in Australia’s Outback, at a fjord in the north of Iceland, in a forest in Norway and on a mountain top in Sweden. One of the works, an additional and almost invisible work titled XXXVI, 2017, an iron sphere placed on the floor, refers directly to the experience of being in the space. This work has a single property: It must remain in Bergen.

TB: A lot of your work, namely the photographic one, seems to stem from your personal travels. How important is this itinerant character in your work and why?

DGC: I love traveling, to be on the road, I am constantly longing for it. Do you know the experience when you travel with a train and outside your window houses pass by, windows upon windows - and you wonder: how is it possible that behind each of these windows whole life stories unfold, of happiness and sorrow, infinite routines and for a split second you pass by, look into this world, become a part of it, a window that is in an instance replaced by another one. The relation I have to my surrounding is different when I am in a place that I don’t know – I am alert, observant and open. I have problems recalling what I did on a specific day three weeks ago in my studio... but I can see with the greatest clarity what I ate that evening in Vernazza and how the sand between my toes would tickle me while waiting for the food to be served.A memory; experiencing a memory, is entirely different to the present experience. Time is absent or deformed. I see a scene in front of me, a mood, I feel something, but the duration is distorted. This scene has no before or after. A memory is like a shape, it has an inside and an outside.

TB: Photography as a medium constitutes an important part of your oeuvre. Apart from its reproductive quality, what attracts you to the medium and what is its role in conjunction with the other media?

DGC: I like the idea that the engagement with my surrounding and subjects leaves no single trace, it doesn’t affect anything. When I photograph, I am not taking anything, transforming what is in front of me, but observing, the gaze through the lens is the only active tool. My interest has never been about what is visible in a photograph, but rather what is not. What hides behind the subject, what happened before this moment was captured? What changed between two photographs that look identical at first sight? There is a photograph entitled Moose, 2017 in the exhibition at Entrée. Espen Johansen and myself drove on a road in Norway. All at once, a gigantic moose came onto the street right in front of us. I grabbed my camera, focused and... it was too late. The framed image now shows an empty street.

Moose, 2017.

TB: This exhibition features works relating to a visit to the Old Tjikko tree site in Norway but also a voyage to the desert of Algodones. Here you seem to be drawn to inhospitable areas, an Arctic forest and a sand desert in the south of the USA. What draws you to these locations and how is that reflected in the work?

DGC: I am fascinated by these kind of remote places. They inhabit a certain type of purity. I don’t mean this in a romantic or esoteric sense. They are in a positive way one- dimensional spaces. A desert is not that far off from the image one has of a desert: There is sand, a little shrub here and there, it is hot, a cloudless sky, a particular silence. A photograph taken on location turns into an image of its idea. Places far away have elements that are familiar to us. This creates a certain tension. Eight years ago I started working on a continuous instalment of exhibitions, each titled after the amount of works in the exhibition itself. The installation at Entrée is perhaps the 18th show of this series. The works are all elements of an expanding web connecting those exhibitions. They reference historical events, discoveries, scientific researches, unresolved cases as well as particularities of locations all over the world. The works might use formal structures of song writing, story telling or research as well as the language of existing works of art.

TB: If you allow me the poetic interpretation, the subjects or moments you focus on seem to often have an almost “Delphic” aura; Animals and plants seem to acquire an almost totemic quality; archetypal if you will and, particular captured experiences draw a sense of augury – as it is the case with the attempt to capture a moose crossing the road present at this exhibition. Either intentional or a formal and visual artifice, the abstractions you capture invoke in me a sense of upmost respect when dealing with personal experience. Can you tell me a bit more about the work subjects you choose and what role personal experience plays in it?

DGC: Stories are an essential part of the human spirit. Stories are passed on from generation to generation, children hear stories before they fall asleep, the news cycle produces one story after the next. A contemporary way to express oneself on social media is to create a narrative around one ́s self. Yet, there is no single “true” story, an event cannot be repeated or be retold in the exact same way it occurred. In this sense every story is an abstraction, a creation. I am using stories as tools to describe a form or shape or to hint towards something else. A very simple example: think of a man who walks from a tree to a lake and stops. His movement has created a line. As it is a story, written down, both the first and last word of this story are visible on the same page. Consequentially, the man is at the same time at every point between the first and last step of his walk. There is a line drawn into the landscape or a kind of sculptural space by his movement.

Old Tjikko

The works, even if in part they might appear diaristic or personal to the viewer, are to my understanding abstract and deconstructed. Having said that, my motivation to make work, ultimately, is personal. With each work I am trying to understand a little bit more about the world around me, about belonging, friendship, death, how time affects everything and the necessity of form. And each work added to the existing works adds a bit more to the web of thoughts and questions between all of them.

TB: Are there any particularities of Nordic landscape and culture that you find recurrent in your work? Do you think you’ll be doing more projects in Norway in the future?

DGC: Most of the time I am intrigued by similarities I find between seemingly detached places and how the different circumstances produce difference. A sandy path on a mediterranean island seems almost identical to one in Iceland. But there are distinct variants as a consequence of the different climate, the different vehicles or animals using the path, etc. I have not seen a lot of Norway yet and feel the urge to go again in the summer, to travel the fjords and discover much more. I am really amazed, how warm and friendly the people are. During my time in Bergen, it rained almost every day, but the faces were smiling as if on a hot summer’s day.

TB: What other projects do you have planned for the future?

DGC: For several years I am working on and off on a vampire film. I shot most of the scenes last year in Transylvania. It is not an actual vampire movie. Rather a visual conversation about, a friendship and its evolution and disappearance. I have just produced a first screen print in many years, it is shown at Entrée. I would like to return to this technique. Right now I am preparing an exhibition at Sies and Höke in Düsseldorf for the end of January 2018.

Five Days, curated by Espen Johansen, is on until until the 13th of January 2018. Daniel Gustav Cramer was born in Düsseldorf, Germany. He is based in Berlin. He studied at the Royal College of Art in London. He has exhibited in numerous places, including dOCUMENTA(13), Kassel, Kunsthaus Glarus, La Kunsthalle Mulhouse, Kunsthalle Lissabon, Kunstsaele, Berlin, CAAC Seville, etc. This year he has exhibited at grey noise in Dubai, UAE, at Verksmiõjan In Akureyri (Iceland), at Vera Cortes in Lisbon, Portugal and Sperling in Munich.

Subjektiv part II invites different artists, curators and thinkers to give us their recent critical perspectives on the issues at stake and on the status of the subjective as an artistic strategy in the current political climate. Today's statement from Andrianna Campbell: Subjectivity has been the concern of every serious student of philosophy for the last few millennia. Moreover, despite claims for subjectivity’s recent politicization, its politics has also run in tandem. In Aristotle’s Politics, he writes, “[That] man is a political animal in a greater measure than any bee or any gregarious animal is clear. For nature, as we declare, does nothing without purpose; and man alone of the animals possesses speech.” Speech is an indicator of the possession of subjectivity; speech conveys into the world the subjectivity of the subject, even when that subject is unaware of how one relates to oneself. The possession of speech, as an ancient form of discourse that we associate with the Greek Lyceum or the Chinese Apricot Altar (Xingtan), not only may convey one’s subjectivity but also one’s politics. Our sociability, how we assemble, is rigorously tied to the acceptable criteria for discussion. Today, affectivity has surpassed objectivity as the defining criteria of cultural dialogue in both public and private discussion platforms. Spaces of feeling have outgrown spaces of discourse (even those in isolated communities and groups). What is clear is that the technology of the digital era has interlinked communities across multiple platforms (Twitter, Facebook, other chat venues). Furthermore, unlike previous eras of social organizing, which produced radical leftist groups such as the Weather Underground or the German Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion or RAF) and radical right groups such as the Ku Klux Klan or Mussolini’s Blackshirts, today’s reinvigorated versions of these radicalized groups have adopted selective exposure and customization of their information feeds. This has led to widespread confirmation bias and a flagrant distrust of traditional sources. It has been good news for the isolated fashion blogger and good news for the white supremacist fringe group.

I begin with Aristotle because that is where I began to examine the self. I studied Aristotle in middle school in a magnet program for inner-city children in Hartford, CT. It was shortly after my family had immigrated to the United States and two years before we moved to the suburbs. In order to protect me from a violent school system, my mother enrolled me in a Classics program at Quirk Middle. I remember Mr. Callahan’s receding white hair. I was one of two students paying attention in his Philosophy 101 class. For most of the others, it seemed disconnected from daily reality. I liked the Greeks because I liked my worn copy of Edith Hamilton’s mythologies. The other alert student, Lara, seemed much more rigorous in her thinking, and less of a romantic. I don’t know her as an adult, but I know from social media that she went on to Princeton and then to law school. She was always perfectly dressed and pressed; she never had a hair out of place. I also remember that the day we studied “the unexamined life is not worth living,” a student had died a few hours earlier. He was stabbed in the courtyard before the morning bell. This was Hartford in the 1990s; when Dan Rather had visited for a nightly news segment, he had worn a flak jacket. It was a “war zone.”

I have never since seen anything like that attack in my life. Our family had no roots in the United States, so it was easier to leave. The horror of those events never became quotidian. I sometimes think about that day, our journey from Aristotle to the Cartesian model of the self, “Cogito ergo sum” (I think therefore I am). And in the years that followed, the shift to reading Jean Paul Sartre. All of this is a flood of visuals: he sees a man in a public park who he recognizes as a man and also as an object. He is seen by another. Thus seeing-the-other is the same as being-seen-by-other. One’s own subjectivity is the site of someone else’s objectivation. The self modified by this moment of cogito in reaction and awareness of an other in the park. That moment of sight also reminds me of Fanon on the train, of the moment in Black Skin, White Masks in which the black protagonist (Fanon) is a triple person. “I had to meet the white man’s eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me. The real world challenged my claims. In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness.” Being black in himself, he does not experience his blackness among other blacks, but in encounter. Fanon draws on and is in contradistinction to both Sartre and Hegel; Fanon wants to escape the perceived dualism in their thinking and therefore deduces his theory of a third consciousness.

I returned to the study of Aristotle in a college course on Western ethics, where our old, white—and often drunk—male professor would begin every class by denigrating diversity. He was even so emboldened, on occasion, as to blame the Jews for the Holocaust. His line of argumentation was that they should have tried harder to fit in to German society. He was often looking at me when he began some diatribe on multiculturalism eroding ethics. Following this, he couldn’t help himself not to comment on the sexual proclivities of the women in the class. This was our ancient philosophy and ethics course. It never blemished my love of Aristotle, but the fury of my response led me to file a formal complaint. My department head said that there was nothing that could be done except another note on his record. It wasn’t the first. These layers of hypocrisy were the very problem of the study of Western ethics as it has been replicated by so many abhorrent figures. Now, with technology, we have vanishing and highly invisible selves. We don’t have to be the people we pretend to be (Socrates) in real life; so much of our pretense happens online. There have been quite a few consequences: an emboldening of public displays of narcissism, and of trolling and bullying behind secretive masks; an attachment to terms such as post-truth and alternate-facts; a distrust of science and theory; a disregard for authority. What happened to values of introspection, honor, sincerity, duty, and ethics? Is there any place for these now, and have those values (in the post-modern sense) been the very means of oppression? Or, as Bruno Latour writes, “are they (as they came out of rationality) fixed in an age that we need variable values?” One can’t help but wonder if, in order to achieve a more democratic body, we must aim to include some of these traits into mutable models.

I am typing this now on my phone while I text my colleague Joanna Fiduccia. I am not looking inward or outward, nor neither or both. I am projecting into the technology an outward self: a self as an extension of mind, body, and spirit. I wonder whether, as in the case of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, the self projects onto another, which brings about a move from the subjective to the objective. Or if technology brings about, in his words, an “end to the antithesis of subject and object.” I wonder if the subjective, when it is placed online, mimics the objective—and if there has never been any division between them. Is the self just a plane of information roaming from one polarity to another? Most information exists in the middle somewhere. The key question: if hierarchies of information become invisible, how we do know who is speaking and why? Remember, speech is a conveyance of subjectivity and a politics. If these mechanisms are invisible, their “enforcement mechanisms … are even harder to discern.” I think about this often because Joanna and I have begun a journal of art writing and art-historical scholarship called apricota. We envision it as subjectivities run amok; however, we were also taken aback by the election. We worry about the value of erudition after the rise of affect and the seeming diminution of truth. As scholars, we both aim for objective knowledge alongside other forms of knowing. We must attempt to get the facts, or get as close to them as possible. Of course, we must be transparent in our opinions. We can address other ways that information circulates—in conversations, in anecdotes, in details that seem personal or even juicy, yes—and try to judge whether it should be part of how we understand culture. We realize a key to so much of this is transparency: of our aims and desires (as much as we can know them). We wish to combat propaganda, to be clear when editorializing, and to promote journalistic integrity. These ideals rest on the long academic tradition of citing sources and giving credit. apricota draws its knowledge accumulation from both the outside, even the liminal, as well as from the inside: we’ll even make room for ancient male philosophers in the Western tradition. If we can write/produce/present/generate this variegated history, then we political beings can create a model—one that trains new generations with the critical judgment to navigate the challenges of upcoming eras. apricota is a journal for a digital age (singular, so far as I understand it), for our age. Or, rather, it is a journal grasping for some dimension of subjectivity that earlier philosophical models could not obtain.

Andrianna Campbell is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she specializes in American art in the modern and contemporary period. She is co-founder of the forthcoming journal apricota.

Subjektiv part II invites different artists, curators and thinkers to give us their recent critical perspectives on the issues at stake and on the status of the subjective as an artistic strategy in the current political climate. Today's statement from artist Kim Westerström: The camera is a room inside a room. Inside the camera, there is light only when the shutter opens. You push the button and for a short time everything is frozen and an image appears. This room could also be a small nest, a shell, a drawer or perhaps a wardrobe. But those were the places of childhood; the camera exists outside time. The camera exists beyond technical innovation. It is just a dark room with a small hole. It is indifferent to whether it is a simple camera obscura or the latest iPhone camera.

Since its invention, the camera has figured centrally in the desire to remember, to recall the past and to make the absent present. My works are in a way all about indexicality. I imagine a small path in the woods, a trace of something that moved but now no longer exists. Everything in the present is marked by the traces of the past. Although, strictly speaking, absence is a thing without matter, absence is ordered, remembered, evoked and made discussable and sufferable through materiality.

By using objects, language and photographs, my works convey an interest in material culture, and in the ways that meaning can transform and translate in different contexts. I use things from everyday life that are marked with absence: chairs, clothes, books, tables, coins, photographs – things that are always around us, which are our culture; things that are what they are because their forms have been moulded by time; things that mankind has shaped into functional forms that represent us; things we live in and with and are more than mere accessories of ourselves. They are our existence, growing out of us, sometimes so tightly bound to us that it is difficult to see the differences between us and them.

When presence is turned into absence, we are faced with irreversible cuts and ruptures of time. For example, in the late 1970s, around the year when I was born, my father had a deep interest in radio communication. He was a radio amateur. One of my first memories is of the wires he installed in the garden, with the goal to receive New Zealand national radio. This antenna was like a net that covered the garden in an attempt to catch the transmission signals. Every time contact was successfully made with a radio station, the station would send my father a postcard with a short text. The entire wall in my father’s office was covered with these postcards. Years passed and new interests awoke and eventually all communication tools were replaced by the internet. The radio amateur was history. Eventually, my father took down the postcards, which left marks on the sun-bleached wall. The radio transmitter was removed to a box in the basement.

Both the future and the past haunt us simultaneously. The present is the most insecure state, but also the only thing that exists, since the past is forever lost and the future still to come. The present leaves a trace and it is through these traces that the absent past creates its presence in memory. Stones talk, chairs talk, dust talks. What is dust? Dust is a fine powder or earth. Dust is a secondary product of dirt. Dust is what we find in corners. Dust is history.

Welcome to the exhibition Subjektiv and the launch of Subjektiv Part II 24th of November until 28th of January, 2018.

Twenty-five years ago, the artist Zoe Leonard sat down in front of a typewriter and wrote her manifesto “I Want a President”:

I want a dyke for president. I want a person with AIDS for president and I want a fag for vice president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn’t have a choice about getting leukemia (...)

Given today’s political climate, Leonard’s manifesto is currently reverberating with renewed force, and the text serves as the starting point for the Subjektiv exhibition that will be on display at Kunstnernes Hus from 24 November. Featuring eight other artists as well, the exhibition will attempt to define a more multi-layered political subject in today’s politically charged environment.

This year, both issues of Objektiv look into the relationships that may arise between art, politics, and subjecthood at the current moment—hence our temporary rebranding as Subjektiv. Part I was launched in June, together with the opening of the exhibition at Malmö Konsthall. Both the show and the magazine issues investigate the present state and condition of subjectivity – and its political potential or impotence.

Subjektiv part II presents twenty-seven artists, curators, and thinkers offering their critical perspectives on the issues at stake and on the status of the subjective as an artistic strategy today.

Dear Catherine …… is how my partner suggested I start this piece, when I expressed that I would find it difficult to do justice to an exhibition for which my initial reaction was simply, fucking great.

Keeping an Eye on the World at Henie Onstad Art Centre is the first survey exhibition in Europe, of American-born Catherine Opie’s photographic work, and to borrow a phrase from the editors of the New York Times Style Magazine, this text will be a ‘by no means exhaustive list’ of all the avenues of thought the exhibition had me wandering along. The show is accompanied by a very detailed catalogue containing all the works on display and more, texts by Ana María Bresciani and Natalie Hope O’Donnell, and four interviews with the artist conducted over the course of twenty years by Russell Ferguson, but I opted to see the exhibition as separate from this background information in order to experience what Opie’s pictures do. And they do, a lot.

The ‘Dear’ in ‘Dear Catherine’ may seem inappropriate given that I do not know the artist. I could have opted simply for ‘Catherine’, but my partner, without having seen the show, was onto something when she suggested this mode of address. As an overwhelming rule of thumb, when she points the camera at other people, Opie titles her photographs with their names. This acknowledgment, or introduction, is just one of the myriad ways in which her works speak of the difficulty facing the documentary photographer as he or she tries to do justice to their subjects. How do you make the complexity of a subject visible, and how is it possible to do for it (a show, a person, a situation) a fraction of what it does for you?

On confronting any photograph, I often begin by naming. Naming allows me to orient myself; it is a mnemonic device and it functions as a handle, both literally and figuratively. I look and categorise, explain what is before me and try to name that which resists explanation. I look and speak, speak and look; no word without sense, no world without word. In Keeping an Eye on the World, I begin by naming ‘mother and child’, the photograph that is in fact called Self-portrait / Nursing, from 2004, hung above the stairs and overlooking the main exhibition hall.

A looming, topless, female figure holds a child in her arms, while the infant sucks on her breast, their eyes are fixed on one another. This reciprocal gaze, so desperately needed between mother and child- to look up and see our look absorbed and acknowledged- is the single most indispensable part of a person’s later psychic wellbeing. The picture triggers something at the base of the neck. It is instantly recognisable. It is an image ingrained in us, partly due to its ubiquity, but also because it evokes a sense of something inscribed but not clearly recollected, the vague memory that we too, were once like that child, in the comfort of that giant body, nestled in the safety of our mother’s arms, ideally anyway. Opie’s piece is a self-portrait, and though hung by itself here, it must be seen in conjunction with the other self-portraits made a decade earlier. Because of this lapse of time, the self-portrait speaks more to change, memory and the passing of the years (a recurring theme in this exhibition) than it does to the current trend of mothers pouring out their #baby-nursing pics on Instagram or Snapchat. Several blue-black tattoos wind their way around Opie’s upper right arm, the arabesques mirroring the draped background, which puts one in mind of a drawing-room portrait. But then, across her chest, scar tissue reveals the word PERVERT.

Any student of photography will be told that photo-graphis is the business of writing with light, and yet it has also been described, perhaps more tellingly, as ‘etching’ with light. The rays bouncing off the subject of the world out there burns its way like acid into whatever light-sensitive surface we use as the foundation for our image, much like the shadows of the dead in Hiroshima, fixed on the ground by the bright light and devastating heat. This idea of etching, like a scar, puts me in mind of John Berger, who said that photography did not come onto the scene to replace drawing, but memory. The scar is a memory inscribed into the being of a person.

Those of use who have spent any time with children understand that it is experience, rather then a written injunction from another, that is the best teacher of all. The scar, as we know from Self-Portrait/Pervert, which we will see later in the exhibition, was once a painful, bloody mess, an open sore. And growing up in some ways has to do with coming to terms with that sore, of learning how to live with it and the designations we once gave ourselves, the categories we forced ourselves into in order to stand out, sharp and defined, against whatever background we found ourselves wrestling.

The nursing of a child will invariably figure as the template for all its later interactions, but it is also a first step in the most basic process of teaching it about categorisation: an I, a you, and a we. – The same goes for looking at photographs. It is a learned experience. Adults who have never seen a photograph can’t translate the homogenous, two-dimensional surface into an experience of a heterogeneous space. Looking is discerning, creating hierarchies, and looking at pictures is a social process. My daughter and I look at the green apple in the book and mouth the words together. We point to the apples on the table. They are red, yes, but also apples. I reach for one and say ‘My apple’. I hand her one and say ‘Your apple’, and together we negotiate the difficult task of being separate entities living communally.

Being and Having

Entering a shared space demands that we deal with our own, and others’ issues of intimacy. To live with others, particularly in the industrialised West, is to negotiate between the desire to be oneself, and the risk of losing that sense of self within a larger social framework. The title of the series Being and Having (1991) speaks of a similar relationship, another negotiation: the opposition between experiencing oneself as vital and malleable on the one hand, and the wish to leave this inevitable ambivalence behind, and become sharply defined.

Descending the staircase from Self-Portrait / Nursing (2004), the viewer is met by twelve photographs from this series. Much has been said and written about their content, and arguably, any photographer could point a camera at a group marginalised on the basis of its sexual orientation and espouse claims similar to those made by Opie about the complex and heterogeneous nature of that group’s identity. However, what makes this series so powerful, and the professed complexity clearly discernible, is the interplay between the subjects (the ‘what’ of the pictures), and the gesture or execution (the ‘how’). Instead of simply documenting some gender-bending play-acting, rather than just show and tell, this interplay does something. These photographs of women’s faces with obviously fake facial hair, set against a bright, rather unpleasant yellow background and framed in thick black frames with metal nametags, mimic a certain crudeness and lack of artistic elegance that might at first be associated with the term ‘Butch’. On closer inspection, however, and over time, it occurs to me that in fact the disproportionately thick frames and uncomfortable, artless cropping of the subjects’ faces reveals a surprising subtlety. The framing is the message.

The development of the photographic frame and formats, and how these relate to compositional techniques, rests on certain preconceived notions of what makes a ‘good’, i.e. harmonious, picture. These formats, like colour film, are to some extent, culturally coded. What strikes me the most about Being and Having is not what is made visible within the frame, but the way the series throws light on how one behaves within any given frame. Though playing around with guises and stereotypes is what grabs us at first, it is the relationship between these stereotypes and the framework within which they are forced to exist which is the most interesting aspect of the series. It is as if the women are coming up at me from the other side, a little too close to the frame itself. The effect is uncanny: at first glance it’s as if they’re peering out at me, but as I linger, an ambivalence is felt; there is a distance with which they approach, regard and relate to the frame, and the space beyond. They do not plead, do not demand; they are simply there. Opie enables a meeting or an encounter; she offers an introduction, not as an appeal to the viewer’s sympathetic (i.e. privileged) nature, but for a meeting that stages the complexity of the situation. We are, subject and viewer alike, asked to acknowledge the frame. If we could recognise and agree that these frames through which we view one another distort and determine how we see on another, perhaps living side by side wouldn’t be such a potentially threatening idea.

Though this series was made more than twenty-five years ago, it is highly relevant, to say the least, in the current climate. What better time to revisit the notion that to meet someone face to face, to engage in the complexity of another and see how much is in fact shared between diverse groups, and how little of others’ experiences and being in fact conform to the stereotypes about them that we carry around?

In Freeways (1994–5), the frame again figures prominently. The series of forty photographs is shot with a panoramic camera and each photograph is printed, like a contact copy perhaps, approximately 6x17 cm in soft, luscious warm tones of grey. They put me in mind of picture postcards found in great grandmother’s valise in the attic, or, perhaps more to the point, photographs of the miracles of modern engineering from Germany in the 1930’s. And yet, for all these references, my strongest reaction is that there is something so lonely about them, or perhaps, about the one behind the camera. In Opie’s portraits, the photographer recedes in order that the subjects come forth, but in these freeway pictures, the person behind the camera becomes noticeable. Taken from under freeway overpasses, or from the vantage point of the shoulder of the road, the most noticeable aspect is the lack of cars. Added to that is my awareness of how on the side-lines, and thus conspicuous, the presumably walking figure of Opie must have been, in a space that is by no means meant for stopping. The only people who do spend time in these places are those who for various reasons lack shelter and do not belong in any way in the kind of photograph most associated with the American freeway- the one taken from the middle of the road, the eye reaching to the horizon and beyond. This typical shot is absent here. Instead, what we get are diagonal lines reaching across the frame, from side to side, obstructing our view of the sky; roadways weaving in and out of each other like bodies that never touch, recalling the thousands of drivers alone in their respective cars, their angry cries, their sing-alongs to distant voices on the radio, or shouts for help muffled by windshields: they are in the world, but completely cut off from each other.

Names are tricky. Ideally we grow into them, become our names and wear them like a well-fitting sweater, but just as often we fail to live up to them.

In the earliest portraits, where the name of each subject functions as its title, the sitters are photographed in poses ranging from the tender to the self-assured, from cocky or playful to distant, from solitary beings to couples. The subjects are seemingly cut out against the brightly coloured backdrops, and put us in mind of children’s picture books, where a similar relation between figure and ground is pronounced in order to aid identification. Opie seems to challenge the viewer to see these subjects as at once conforming to certain stereotypes, and as individuals that can in no easy way be reduced to those stereotypes.

In the later portraits, those made between 2012 and 2017, where a few of the sitters from the earlier series re-appear, and new ones like her son and his mouse emerge, the artist has left the colourful backgrounds behind in favour of one that is dead black.

This move could be telling of a shift in the artist’s perception of her subject matter, or of her own understanding of the medium and its possibilities. In the transition from the portraits of 1993–97, the series Self-Portraits and Dyke, the Portraits and Landscapes from 2012–17 and High School Football 2007–9, we witness a gradual transformation of Opie’s subjective stance towards the medium, her subjects and herself as artist. Photography can ideally make what was hitherto invisible, visible. But visibility and exposure always stand in danger of becoming overexposure and thus invisibility, in the same way as saying a word over and over again will lead to its loss of meaning. Perhaps what appears in the later portraits as a kind of genre-painting style,complete with softly spot-lit bodies cloaked in black, some printed as ovals rather than rectangles, is a nod to how the photographing of any marginal group at some point suffers from fatigue and becomes yet another genre. Or could we view this turn in Opie’s portraiture as a productive doubt, revealing a certain maturity?

Courtesy Catherine Opie, Regen Projects & Peder Lund.

As Jose Saramago points out: ‘inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.’ By posing her subjects in these later portraits against the pitch-black background, an existential dimension, less noticeable or overlooked in her earlier work, becomes visible. Once you begin being, once you recognise it as more vital than having, you are faced with a certain loss of ground, mirrored in this vast blackness. One of the marks of maturity is perhaps to leave behind the illusion that a name, self-designated or otherwise, or belonging to a certain group, will suture the chasm between yourself and others, between the demands of the world and your own needs, or make you complete. I think of the word ‘Dyke’ tattooed across the nape of the neck, that most sensitive part of the body, in the picture Dyke from 1994, and of the repossession of that slur by the lesbian community. The youthful figure with her back turned to us conveys a need to define oneself and take over the meaning of derogatory terms in order to redefine them. This need of empowerment, so often felt in formative years, to brandish oneself, to define and identify with a certain group, recalls Pervert, the self-portrait from 1994 that left a scar visible a decade later. It is a need to show that which cannot be shown, to confront the suffocation of certain terms, of one’s own unruly desires, the straightjackets imposed or self-imposed. A decade or two on, when new relationships and new communities have been forged by a whole set of different circumstances, a child and a family perhaps – relationships born of being rather than having – PERVERT is a scar reminding you that who you were and who you are are two sides of the same coin: you are different but still you.

I look at Opie’s Football Landscape, part of her High School Football series, focusing on this staple of American life and culture, and I think of the artist standing on the side of the football field in the pouring rain. I am reminded of my own three years spent in an American high school in Singapore: the jocks occupying the three first tables in the cafeteria, those football players with names like Josh, John, Justin and Rick, these kids my friends and I so clearly defined ourselves as being in opposition to, whose automatic response to pretty much anything was ‘Dude, that’s so fucking gay’, and I wonder what it’s like to revisit those kinds of places as an adult, seeing similar kids with the distance of a generation. I look at the photographs that Opie has made of these high-school football players – tender, slightly off-kilter photographs mirroring off-kilter bodies and clumsy, wonderfully diverse individuals – and I notice that this idea that the ‘jocks’ are a homogenous group of boys, like in a John Hughes movie from the eighties, has been shattered to bits. And it is precisely this that Opie and her photographs do.

By blending the what of her photographs with the how so subtly that she risks reinforcing the stereotypes she seeks to dispel, Opie challenges us to see beyond our own frames of reference, first impressions, preconceptions and idiosyncratic proclivities. This challenge is a way of doing justice to the beholder, a sign of trust, a reaching out. By setting up these encounters, where we face others who in turn face us in all our complexity and strangeness, Opie forges community, rather than simply talking about it. In increasingly polarised times, when US and THEM again seem to dominate the public discourse, whether we live in the hills of Oslo or Beverly Hills, Opie reminds us that community is not simply a set of practices, styles, ideologies or any of a myriad affinities that might exist between people to make them feel safe. It is rather the sum of our differences, the relations to which these differences give rise, and in the end, how we negotiate all that diversity and find suitable solutions for cohabitation, however impossible that might seem.

John Berger, Another way of telling, 1982. Copyright John Berger and Jean Mohr. Pantheon Books, New York.

Jose Saramago. Blindness, 1995, English translation, 1997.

Catherine Opie, Keeping an Eye on the World, at Henie Onstadfrom October 6 through January 7, 2018.